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Thinking Planning and Urbanism moore_milroy.indd 1 11/06/2009 11:53:35 AM

Transcript of Thinking Planning and Urbanism - UBC Press · Thinking, planning and urbanism / Beth Moore Milroy....

Thinking Planning and Urbanism

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Thinking Planning and Urbanism

B e T h M o o r e M i l r oy

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© UBC Press 2009

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission of the publisher, or, in Canada, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), www.accesscopyright.ca.

17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in Canada with vegetable-based inks on paper that is processed chlorine- and acid-free.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Milroy, Beth Moore, 1940-Thinking, planning and urbanism / Beth Moore Milroy.

Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-0-7748-1614-4

1. City planning – Ontario – Toronto. 2. Sociology, Urban – Ontario – Toronto.I. Title.

HT178.C22T67 2009 307.1’21609713541 C2009-902736-4

UBC Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support for our publishing program of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), and of the Canada Council for the Arts, and the British Columbia Arts Council.

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

UBC PressThe University of British Columbia2029 West MallVancouver, BC V6T 1Z2 604-822-5959 / Fax: 604-822-6083www.ubcpress.ca

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The true story lies among the other stories ... M a r g a r e t a t w o o d ,

“ t r u e S t o r i e S ”

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Contents

List of Illustrations / ix

Acknowledgments / xi

Abbreviations / xiii

1 Opening / 1

2 History / 42

(with Nik Luka)

3 Regenerating / 67

4 Redeveloping / 98

5 Defending / 138

6 Implementing / 180

7 Closing / 217

Appendix 1 Selected elements of the planning framework / 238

Appendix 2 Chronology / 250

Appendix 3 Basic characteristics of the planning area / 254

Appendix 4 Socioeconomic information about the planning area / 257

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viii Contents

Appendix 5 Seven development options, Yonge and Dundas area,

December 1996 / 260

Appendix 6 Financial plan and costing scenarios, Yonge and Dundas

area, December 1996 / 262

Appendix 7 Issues raised at public meetings and via correspondence

regarding the redevelopment scheme, spring 1997 / 266

Appendix 8 Bylaws before the Joint Board / 269

Appendix 9 Decision of the Joint Board: Jurisdiction, conclusions and

findings, decision and conditions, and obiter dicta / 271

Appendix 10 Sample calendar of events at Nathan Phillips Square

January to July 2000 / 280

Notes / 282

References / 293

Index / 308

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list of illustrations

Figures

1.1 Toronto in its North American context / 3

1.2 Toronto in its regional context / 4

1.3 Selected subareas of the City of Toronto’s core / 5

1.4 Southeast corner of Yonge and Dundas, 1998 / 6

1.5 Northeast corner of Yonge and Dundas, 1998 / 6

1.6 Looking southeast down Yonge Street, 1998 / 7

1.7 Yonge and Dundas’ new image, 2007 / 7

1.8 Dundas Square, formally named Toronto Life Square, 2008 / 8

2.1 The Toronto Plant of the T. Eaton Co., c. 1919 / 48

2.2 Yonge Street as a boulevard in front of Eaton’s College Street store,

c. 2008 / 48

2.3 Yonge Street Strip, 1975 / 53

2.4 Yonge Street as pedestrian mall, 1974 / 54

2.5 Toronto Eaton Centre interior, 2008 / 58

2.6 Plan to connect Dundas Street West and East / 63

3.1 HMV’s “urban box” form, 2005 / 72

3.2 Looking south on Yonge Street, 1999 / 78

3.3 Reinvestment area and larger community improvement area / 80

3.4 Yonge Street’s built-form context, 1996 / 83

4.1 Development parcels, Yonge Dundas Redevelopment Project / 108

4.2 Original illustration for the redevelopment of the Yonge-Dundas area,

1998 / 109

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x list of illustrations

4.3 Conceptual drawing of the future square and surroundings, 1997 / 110

5.1 Looking south down Yonge Street to Lake Ontario / 147

6.1 Salvation Army building and the Senator, 1998 / 185

6.2 Original design of the Torch, 1999 / 187

6.3 The Torch, 2008 / 188

6.4 Dundas Square, winning design, 1998 / 191

6.5 Triangular sidewalk outside the Eaton Centre, 1999 / 200

6.6 Reduced sidewalk outside the Eaton Centre, 2008 / 200

6.7 Downtown Yonge Business Improvement Area boundaries, 2001 / 202

6.8 Chess players on Gould Street, 1999 / 211

Tables

4.1 Number of police “contact events,” 1995-97 / 132

4.2 Drug, prostitution, and total criminal offences, 1996 and 1997 / 133

6.1 Changing management of Dundas Square / 193

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Acknowledgments

At the beginning of this project, Nik Luka was as deeply immersed in the

Yonge-Dundas material as I was. I thank him for many hours of discussion

and research devoted to trying to decide what to make of the transformation

that was taking place quite literally outside the doors of the Ryerson Univer-

sity planning school. We met at Ryerson, where I was the director of the

planning school. I had recently arrived in Toronto and was digging myself

into the local culture, while he, a Toronto-born young graduate of the plan-

ning program, was preparing to leave town. There was a fruitful period of

overlap. He subsequently went on to other intellectual pursuits, and, in the

fullness of time, the project evolved into something quite different from where

we had started. I gratefully acknowledge his early collaboration, which was

a pleasure to have had, and expressly add that he bears no responsibility

whatever for any judgments, errors, or omissions in the final text.

It was a great help to have been invited to discuss the project with under-

graduate and master’s students in several programs at Ryerson University and

the University of Toronto and in doctoral seminars at the University of To-

ronto and the Università di Roma Tre. As I prepared for each of these events,

my rising level of anxiety about how I would be able to simply and suc-

cinctly say what seemed only complicated and unyielding to abbreviation had

a way of focusing the mind, as the expression goes. I thank all who partici-

pated in debating why with me at these events. My ideas were also sharpened

along the way thanks to exchanges with Heather Campbell, Philippa Campsie,

Brendan Cormier, Frances Frisken, Neil Harris, Michael Neuman, Lucia Nucci,

Giorgio Piccinato, Katharine Rankin, Scott Rodgers, Yvonne Rydin, Huw

Thomas, and several anonymous referees who critically read versions of the

manuscript. I sincerely thank them all for their insightful comments. A special

thank you also goes to Luigi Mazza for several conversations that contributed

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xii Acknowledgments

to this project, all of which took place during delightful periodic walkabouts

in various European and North American cities.

Because of the location and nature of the project, it needed little funding.

However, I was glad to have received several small grants that I used to hire

occasional research assistants and specialized professional services and to

travel to academic meetings in France, England, and the United States to

discuss the work as it progressed. For this most welcome assistance, I thank

Ryerson University and, in particular, the Faculty of Community Services.

I was often given assistance in timely and important ways by friends, col-

leagues, assistants, and strangers regarding materials used in the writing of

this book. Many thanks go to all of them, including, but not limited to, the

following: Judith Bell, Louise Berthiaume, Scéno Plus, Montreal; Carys Craig;

Elizabeth Cuthbertson, City of Toronto; Paula Gallo; Carolyn Gray, senior

copyright advisor, Service Ontario Publications; Gordon Grice, Gordon Grice

and Associates, Toronto; Sherrill Rand Harrison, Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia;

Ian Lord, Weir & Foulds, Toronto; James Robinson, Downtown Yonge Busi-

ness Improvement Area; Zack Taylor; Cheryn Toun, City of Toronto; Stephen

Waqué, Toronto, for permission to quote from “Notes on argument in chief

by the City of Toronto,” 1998; and Richard White.

Finally, my very special appreciation goes to Barbara, Louis, and Jessica,

who lovingly and continuously share so much with me, including their ap-

petite for ideas and learning.

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Abbreviations

BIA business improvement area

BID business improvement district

CCTV closed circuit television

CIP community improvement project

DYBIA Downtown Yonge Business Improvement Area

DTYS Downtown Yonge Street

GDRA Garden District Residents Association

OMB Ontario Municipal Board

OPA official plan amendment

PPP public-private partnership

RFP request for proposals

RFQ request for qualifications

TEDNA Toronto East Downtown Neighbourhood Association;

Toronto East Downtown Neighbourhood Alliance

TEDRA Toronto East Downtown Residents Association

TTC Toronto Transit Commission

UDC urban development corporation

UDP urban development project

UEC urban entertainment centre

YSBRA Yonge Street Business and Residents Association

YSM Yonge Street Mission

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Thinking Planning and Urbanism

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CHaPter 1

opening

On one level, this book is about how planners and others puzzled over what

to do with a small downtown area in Toronto and the eventual outcome, a

redevelopment intended to mimic New York’s Times Square and London’s

Leicester Square. It is a story of planners at work on a difficult issue in per-

plexing times, and it is described in detail from conceptualization to imple-

mentation to show precisely how planning was practised. On another level,

this case is paradigmatic of planning problems encountered in a broad spec-

trum of urban areas where pressures of contemporary urbanism are felt. These

pressures include the problem of how to pump new value into small areas

when conventional assumptions about the relationship between an urban

core and its periphery no longer obtain. For example, one outdated assump-

tion is that the core provides essential services for its periphery; another is

that “urbanness” is measured by population density rather than electronic and

other exchanges. At this second level, the book grapples with the adequacy

of the theories planners use to inform their work on a planned intervention

such as this.

The powers and forces configuring urban areas today are considerably differ-

ent from those associated with the industrial revolution of the mid-nineteenth

to mid-twentieth centuries. Many attribute current changes primarily to global-

izing economies and concomitant social conditions. While these forces are

undoubtedly major contributors, the context in which this case study unfolds

points at least as much to technology as a driver of contemporary urban form.

The urban and regional planning field has tended to be less cognizant of

technology’s significance to the evolution of urban form, except as a deriva-

tive of economic and social revolutions.1 Transportation and communications

technology in particular add specific capacities to urban development, such

as being able to spread out over enormous areas while still enabling people

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2 opening

to be connected at any time to anywhere else. How to deal with the diffuse

settlement patterns made possible by the combination of technological, social,

and economic changes is a major question. A complementary question is how

to treat the holes that are left, or made, in contemporary urban space by

expansive development. Together, these questions call for a new form of

urbanity, of conviviality, and for a reciprocal readjustment between the form

of the urban tissue and the forms of engaging with each other.2

The story is about a specific type of small core area space and the argu-

ments for conceptualizing the space in particular ways. Throughout city his-

tory, such debates have been common. In this instance, there is an unusual

opportunity to examine the discussions in detail because the city’s planning

department put forward two proposed solutions concerning the same site,

each of which was dominated by a dramatically different conceptualization

of space. In the first proposal, the aesthetics of space, such as perspective

and proportionality, and its technical features, such as sunlight and relative

location of things, carried considerable weight. In the second proposal, space

was conceptualized as nothing in and of itself but instead as what can be

created out of it by people who seek to use the space to advance their goals,

be they economic, social, or political. That is, the dominant conceptualization

of the second proposal is that space is produced through social relations.

Seeing the two proposals side by side sharpens the distinction between

technical-aesthetic and socioeconomic conceptions of space and prompts

questions about how the two inform theories and practices of planning.

As a point of departure, I accept that both the technical-aesthetic and socio-

economic conceptualizations of space are properly part of urbanism and

urban planning. This study explores a case in which the tension between

the two understandings of space was lost. When the second proposal was

implemented, a model from elsewhere that was expected to solve social

and economic problems was set down in the city core in a location defined

as a suitable receptacle for the proposed treatment. Scholars have analyzed

comparable projects, using social science–based urban theories to uncover

how and why such projects were developed. While recognizing their insights,

I have approached this case differently, immersing myself in its dense detail

to see what questions it raised about planning and urbanism. The manner

of conceptualizing space emerged as a central issue. It shaped the propos-

als of planning practitioners, and it either opened up or closed down the

potential for innovation. The proposals are classic illustrations of how to treat

space, each with centuries of urbanistic practice behind them. I consider

the implications of these conceptualizations of urban space for theorizing

planning.

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3opening

The Story in a Nutshell

The area in question is in the vicinity of the intersection of Yonge and Dun-

das streets in downtown Toronto. (See Figures 1.1 and 1.2 to locate Toronto

in its North American and regional contexts and Figure 1.3 for selected sub-

areas of the city’s core, which is where the case takes place. See Appendix 3

for a written description of the area.) For years people had noted the absence

of redevelopment money going into the ten or so blocks in the vicinity of the

intersection. Some said redevelopment was not happening because the area

C A N A D AU S A

OntarioQuebec

Montreal

Ottawa

Detroit

Chicago

Boston

New York

Atlanta

Washington, DC

Miami

Houston

TORONTO

Halifax

500 km (300 miles)

1000 km (600 miles)

1500 km (900 miles)C A N A D A

KEYAREA

U S A

1.1 Toronto in its North American context. | Adapted from Toronto (1992, 113).

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4 opening

was so down-at-the-heel; others argued the reverse – that it was down-at-

the-heel because the land use restrictions in the city’s official plan discouraged

redevelopment. Whatever the cause, the area was in poorer condition than

civic authorities and a wide range of other people thought appropriate. After

all, this was reputedly the busiest corner in the country and the location of

the main door of the Eaton Centre shopping mall, which is said to have the

highest turnover retail sales space in Canada. It was widely agreed that a

planned solution was needed. Efforts made to fix up the area over more than

two decades were judged to have had little effect.

1.2 Toronto in its regional context. Aside from the City of Toronto, only upper-tier municipal boundaries – counties and regional municipalities prior to amalgamation – are shown. | Adapted from Toronto (1992, 113).

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5opening

For decades there has been hand wringing over the Yonge Street Strip. Older

adults have worried about its influence on their children at least since hippie

youths hung out there in the 1970s, followed by punk youths in the 1980s

and hip-hop youths in the 1990s, always with a certain amount of drug use

and trade happening. From the early ’90s, the picture also included increased

numbers of students at Ryerson University a block away; two youth shelters

and a shelter for homeless men within two blocks of the intersection; increased

numbers of psychiatrically disturbed people wandering around because de-

institutionalization policies were not matched by community care; more

homeless people because senior government funding for all social housing

programs had been stopped; and more panhandling and loitering than had

likely been seen in Toronto since the 1930s because welfare provisions had

been cut by more than 20 percent on top of a deep five-year recession, which

brought high unemployment rates, particularly for young people. By the mid-

1990s Yonge-Dundas looked very stressed, certainly to middle-class eyes. (See

Figures 1.4 to 1.8 for before and after views of the Yonge-Dundas area.)

1.3 Selected subareas of the City of Toronto’s core. | Adapted from Toronto (1990b, 16) and Toronto (1994c,

Map M.2)

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6 opening

1.4 The World’s Biggest Jean Store on the southeast corner of yonge and Dundas, 1998. | Author’s collection.

1.5 Stores on the northeast corner of yonge and Dundas, 1998. | Author’s collection.

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7opening

1.6 looking southeast down yonge Street, 1998. Dundas Square Street is to the left; eaton Centre is on the extreme right. | Author’s collection.

1.7 yonge and Dundas’ new image, 2007. Dundas Square, looking west from the bandstand to eaton Centre with its media tower. | Author’s collection.

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8 opening

In 1996 two solutions were proposed: a gentle regeneration-style solution

was approved but was superseded nine months later by a dramatic expropriate-

and-redevelop proposal. The latter has been in the process of implementation

ever since and is the proposal that receives all of the attention. No one seems

to remember the regeneration plan. Politics had a great deal to do with the

switch from one plan to the other. Because there were two plans from the

same planning department and from some of the same planners for the same

geographic space in overlapping time periods, their foci and rationales can

be compared. In the transition from one to the other, we see the position in

which the planning department (the Planning and Development Department,

which was renamed Urban Development Services in September 1996) found

itself after having been politically forced to reassess its first, gentler strategy.

The routes open to the planning department seemed to be as follows: (1) to

refuse the new, more aggressive model and be sidelined while the planning

framework was operated without the planning department; (2) to strongly

make a case for why the new approach was wrong and then, if the city

1.8 looking south over Dundas Square, formally named Toronto life Square, on a sunny Sunday afternoon in May 2008. hard rock Cafe is just off the square on the right. Financial district towers are in the background. | Courtesy of Sherrill rand harrison.

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9opening

council still insisted on going ahead, to do the best planning job possible by

trying to avoid the worst outcomes; or (3) to be persuaded to go ahead with

it, either because the department saw no alternative or because the second

proposal was the better strategy. Regardless of whether it was in its better

judgment, the planning department took the third route, at least publicly.

Because it chose the third alternative, the planning department had to for-

mally defend it when an appeal was launched.

Planning was central in this case and, indeed, a battleground for political

struggles. In one struggle, planners were pitted against planners: the city used

in-house and contract planners and a coalition of area business interests to

oppose another set of business interests equipped with its own contract plan-

ners, economists, and land evaluation experts. In another struggle, certain

interests were trying to shift the role of planning in Toronto. The justifications

the city gave for its change from regeneration to redevelopment, and for its

preference for its own plans over those proposed by opponents, provide

some evidence for the hypothesis that planning in Toronto was being nudged

toward an entrepreneurial approach, that is, to inviting the private sector to

lead redevelopment initiatives and reap the rewards of property value in-

creases.3 This contrasted sharply with conventional planning approaches in

Toronto, including the predecessor plan for Yonge-Dundas. Using Brindley,

Rydin, and Stoker’s (1989, 11) terms of analysis, the regeneration plan could

be described as a mix of regulative and trend approaches, that is, managing

urban development in the public interest while using a few tools to entice

the market to deliver what it was more or less ready to offer anyway. As for

the redevelopment approach, the term “entrepreneurial” does indeed describe

it. The project site was turned over to private-sector redevelopment interests

to make Toronto more competitive in comparison to other cities; processes

were largely kept away from public scrutiny, and the so-called public square

ended up promoting private consumption. A decade later we can see that

entrepreneurial planning like this has not taken over in Toronto but, like

elsewhere, has become one style among several that a city may employ. As

an approach, entrepreneurial planning is likely to produce repetitious rather

than distinctive environments (see Hall 2002, chap. 11; Loukaitou-Sideris and

Banerjee 1998, 292) and, thus, less competitiveness (Hanna and Walton-

Roberts 2004). However, beyond the matter of planning styles, there is now

an overall greater propensity than there was in the mid-1990s to use more

entrepreneurial attitudes, actions, and language (Courchene and Telmer 1998;

Laxer 1995); to seek to criminalize or ostracize poverty (Gordon 2004; Kipfer

and Keil 2002); and to use mixed public-private ventures to carry out a variety

of municipal activities by various means, as has been seen in many other

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10 opening

cities (e.g., DeFilippis 1997; Eisinger 2000; Gómez 1998; Gómez and Gonzá-

lez 2001; Hagen Hodgson 1997; Hoyt 2003; McGuirk and MacLaran 2001;

Plaza 1999, 2008; Waitt 1999; Williams 2003; Winter and Brooke 1993).

What kind of reasoning went into justifying the second project? Some of it

was sound and appropriate, but much was fallacious (appeals to emotion

were used, symptoms and root problems were elided, solutions used elsewhere

were parroted), and much was post hoc rationalizing with a view to obtaining

approval for a project that proponents wanted, regardless of whether there

was evidence to support it. As was the case in Bent Flyvbjerg’s (1998) Danish

example, rationality took the form of Realrationalität, that is, rationality prac-

tised in the face of power.

One of the fallouts from this entrepreneurial example concerned the com-

mons, which shrank because public space was turned over for private inter-

ests to shape. The use of the term “public space” assumes that it is useful to

define space along a public-private axis, even though meanings will be

specific to cultures and historical periods (Lofland 1998, 8). Not all public

spaces have the same level of publicness. The most public of spaces are

owned by governments and are expected to remain open for public discus-

sion and political expression; traditionally, these are streets, sidewalks, parks,

and squares. Other forums, such as community centres, libraries, universities,

subways, and airports, may have constraints on their use that do not apply

to traditional public spaces. Dina Graser’s (2000, 70) assessment of a govern-

ment’s relationship to public space in the Canadian legal framework is that it

is quasi-fiduciary, which means that governments “have a responsibility not

to unduly restrict freedom of speech in public spaces” and “a corresponding

obligation ... to ensure a right of access for this purpose as an essential part

of a functioning democracy.” In this view, traditional public spaces are places

where political activity may be expected, not places to be protected from

politics (Deutsche 1996, 283). They are places where those people whose

behaviour – sleeping on the street or panhandling – may disrupt a notion of

urban order have a rightful place, along with anyone else who may, when

encountering them on the street, be reminded of the political fact that their

government appears to be failing some of its citizens.4 In the Yonge-Dundas

area, some of the merchants set up a so-called public-private partnership with

the city to mastermind redevelopment of the street. Subsequently, the city

created a board dominated by active proponents of the redevelopment to run

the square, and a new privately managed Business Improvement Area was

established in accordance with provincial regulations to look after the sur-

roundings. It treats the street rather like a mall, so the street’s character changed

from political to economic (Graser 2000, 68-69). The actual street, not simply

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11opening

its uses, was commercialized with the assistance of the city and the province.

The conventional idea of a street was challenged, as was the idea of the city

square. Private security services were procured for the square, and the new

board sought to sell the “public” square to paying users. The administrative

set-up of the square is, therefore, contrary to the grounds upon which the

city approved the development and defended it in a legal wrangle. The degree

to which this development increased cynicism about the commons cannot be

gauged.

The unstated goal of the Yonge-Dundas redevelopment was to increase

consumer spending in the area. All imagery was directed to that aim via

spectacularization – passive watching and being in the presence of spectacles.

Huge lighted screens hang on almost every surface around the square, ad-

vertising products, services, and lifestyles. Spectacular events periodically fill

the square to boost consumption: Sir Richard Branson sliding down a wire

from the Olympic Torch into the square to launch his newest Virgin product;

the World’s Biggest Stir Fry to promote Arctic Gardens food products; a world-

record-seeking, chocolate-milk-chugging contest to advertise Grab, Gulp, and

Go from Nestlé.5 Consumption is an individualized activity for the consumer

and a privatized activity for the provider. When streets and squares are de-

signed to serve individual and private activities, the conventional assumptions

of the public-private axis are completely altered. Part of the unwritten social

contract has been revised – without taking a vote. This is why it is important

to pay attention to the transformation that occurred with the help of the plan-

ning framework.6 Civic place making, as Peter Rowe (1997) describes it, re-

quires both publicness for democratic reasons and aesthetic appeal for a wide

range of people. Together, the socioeconomic and technical-aesthetic can

make a civic place. Torontonians learned not to take for granted that their

civic government would use its property to make a civic place.

A stated goal of the redevelopment phase was to increase the variety of

people using the area; however, the mix was already astonishing. In fact, the

project was designed to flatten the mix to a particular consumer stratum. It is

difficult to avoid the conclusion that the stated goal was code for increasing

the number of people with disposable incomes and discouraging the presence

of loiterers, indigents, and those working in the underground economy.7 Since

no survey was done of who was using the area, the outcome of this large

intervention can never be evaluated from the point of view of its often-stated

goal. Indeed, despite all the money spent on costly contract planners, expro-

priation lawyers, land economists, disturbance damage experts, quantity

surveyors, tax experts, signage rights specialists, and square naming experts,

no one asked what that goal meant and whether physical redevelopment

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12 opening

would achieve it, let alone whether it was the best way to achieve it. The

opponents’ counsel in a quasi-judicial hearing into the need for expropriations

to accommodate this project was the only person who tried to show why that

goal was not achievable via the chosen means.

It is unclear how success should be measured in this case. Were planners

guided by public or private interests? When it comes to planning actions on

the ground, is the putative division of public and private interests even useful?

If the area attracts new international chain retail outlets as was expressly

desired by the project planners, along with family shoppers whom the ward

councillor wanted to see there, and tourists who were the hope of busi-

nesses in the area, then some will take those results as signs that the redevel-

opment worked. And if the dollar stores, drugs, and homeless people move

elsewhere in the downtown area, by what measure would these city-owned

issues have been solved? Has the public interest been served?8 Or, how does

one measure Torontonians’ sense of having been duped when it is found that

the public square is managed first and foremost for commercial interests? How

can this venture be evaluated when the cost to the city can never be known,

at least from outside the bureaucracy? Many of the documents necessary to

make that assessment were purged from public files on the ground of confi-

dentiality. The idea of planning as an activity that serves the public interest

is severely tested in this case. To what extent was society improved by these

activities?

In my view, this case is not unusual. This is a study of decision making and

action as planners often experience them – as struggles over who controls

decisions, investment opportunities, and symbols in a city’s core. Planners

were working on a difficult problem and, in this instance, in a very difficult

context. The planning of Yonge-Dundas took place at a time when the city

was emerging from a deep recession that had lasted five years, from 1989 to

the end of 1994. In mid-1995 a newly elected provincial government came

to power on a platform – the common sense revolution – that had all the

earmarks of neoconservatism. It promised to fix Ontario’s economy via huge

tax cuts, the reduction of social programs, and the introduction of workfare

and law-and-order measures. In the course of this “revolution,” the new

government sought to reduce the number of local governments and their

range of activities, including subsidized housing and libraries (Courchene

and Telmer 1998; Ibbitson 1997). By the end of 1996, the city of Toronto was

trying to stave off legislation to force its own amalgamation with five adjacent

cities and the eradication of the metropolitan level of government, which had

been in place for forty-five years and was a model of success. The metropol-

itan government had been credited with contributing to the Toronto region’s

incorporation of rapid population growth while maintaining a healthy city

moore_milroy.indd 12 11/06/2009 11:53:37 AM

13opening

core, unlike many US cities (Frisken 2008, chap. 1; Lemon 1996, chap. 7;

Sharpe 1996). For a few months in 1997, during the later planning period for

Yonge-Dundas, the attention of city officials and Torontonians was on trying

to convince the provincial government to reverse its amalgamation plans and

a confusing series of moves designed to alter the financial responsibilities of

the municipalities and the province. Once the Toronto amalgamation was

certain to go ahead, politicians and bureaucrats began to position themselves

as best they could, because it was obvious many would lose their jobs by the

end of the year in the next civic election, when the number of elected officials

would be cut in half.

It was in the midst of unprecedented pressure by the province to amalgam-

ate voluntarily or be forcibly amalgamated, and the subsequent reorganization

of local government departments, that those involved in the Yonge-Dundas

project laboured (Frisken 2008, chap. 6; Sancton 2000). Although it was a

busy time and, consequently, there may have been some inattention, the area

around this intersection was not so different that the lessons of the case are

inapplicable to other times and places. Local government is more often than

not a tremendously busy arena, and many who, in the best of all possible

worlds, would want to give individual issues more attention are actually too

busy to do so.

Situating Contemporary Urbanized Space

In order to situate contemporary urbanized space, a quick trip through time

is necessary. Simplifying excessively, Western city formation can be envisaged

as having taken three forms, albeit with many variations, since antiquity. The

first phase is represented by the classic city, in which a person’s place of

residence and citizenship were closely correlated so that a citizen belonged

to a place. City spaces were distinguishable from rural spaces, and activities

in the two were mainly complementary. The building of cities was planned

and managed through various means, including civic governments of admin-

istrators and councils. From at least Roman times, dense population and diverse

activities have been defining features of cities.

The second phase is represented by the city of the Industrial Revolution,

which emerged with massive migrations of people from the countryside as

well as from one country to another. Out of that period of urbanization came

the new word “urbanism,” which refers to reflections on and the shaping and

managing of densely populated and dynamic urban areas. Urbanism is one

name for practices that today include urban and regional planning. The

complementarity of urban and rural ways of life changed gradually as “work”

came to be identified with employment in the cities of the new industrial

capitalism. The identification of work with the city reinforced a core-periphery

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14 opening

relationship in which the city centre was the service site for its hinterland.

Built-form changes included trying to bring, for health and safety reasons,

the country into the city via gardens and open spaces and the city to the

country via low-density new towns. Although explanations for the rise of

industrial cities tend to focus on the economic and social revolutions of the

time, the argument can be made that an ongoing technological revolution in

transportation, communications, electrification, and building techniques was

just as responsible for making the industrial city possible (Ascher 2001; Choay

1994, 27-28).

The third phase – which was also spurred by the ongoing technological

revolution, especially in communications, and associated with new possibilities

for economic production and management, and for urban form – was felt by

the 1960s. Dispersion was added to urban sprawl. As in the previous phase,

settlement continued in suburbs, but it expanded well beyond them into

hinterlands that were not contiguous with urban regions. For example, in

Canada from the early 1990s a growing number of “amenity movers” chose

places that offered pleasure over economic opportunities – perhaps a slower

pace of life, ski hills, hiking trails, beaches, sailing, splendid views, or clean

air – even when these were in isolated locations (Chipeniuk 2005). The city

centre no longer provided essential services for those in the vast periphery.

The complementarity of urban and rural ways of life ceased to be the norm.

The correlation between place of residence, work, and citizenship weakened

so much that a person might live in one location, work in another, and be a

citizen elsewhere. In this “hyperurbanité,” the density of movement is more

significant than population density (Bordreuil 2000, 169). If footloose indus-

tries showed a marked increase in the earlier decades of this phase, footloose

workers – people who can choose where they work and live – have become

more common in its later decades.

There is no consensus on what to call the contemporary phase of urban-

ization, which affects people on five continents, or the type of urban form

that is being generated. The phase and the form are not separable. Regardless

of whether people live in villages or large cities, their experiences are increas-

ingly shaped by “the urban,” a kind of generalized, global urbanness. Louis

Wirth’s phrase “urbanism as a way of life” seems apt, even if his analysis does

not apply today ([1938] 1969). Names for the phase include the information

age, the network society (Castells 1996), l’urbain, l’ère de l’aménagement

reticulée (the era of networked land-use planning) (Choay 1994, 1999), and

société hypertexte (Ascher 2001). On the unanswered question of what to call

the urban areas that are situated within the broader urbanness that shapes

our way of life, Kenza Benali (2006) gives a helpful overview of the issues.

One issue is that the larger urban areas are less reliant on the state than had

moore_milroy.indd 14 11/06/2009 11:53:37 AM

15opening

been typical in the industrializing period, and they function increasingly as

cities linked together in defined ways. Eclipsing conventional metropolitan

and regional forms, terms such as système métapolis (Ascher 2001), “city-re-

gion,” “super-region” (Courchene and Telmer 1998; Jonas and Ward 2007;

Scott and Storper 2003), “polycentric metropolis,” “mega-city region,” “poly-

opolis” (Hall and Pain 2006), or “network” refer to urbanized areas that are

not necessarily contiguous and may even cross national boundaries but link

up to create a competitive edge for some product or service. Sometimes

“postindustrial city” is used, but the term has drawbacks. First, it implies a

counteraction to the industrial city. It draws attention to economic activity

rather than to the opportunities that these areas generate to innovatively

combine a range of activities across various spaces, and it hides new techno-

logical evolution. Second, the term retains the word “city,” which is a problem

given that the complementarity of city-not city has been severed, as has the

connection between territory and citizenship that was a hallmark of the clas-

sic city. “Urban” is more dynamic, less bounded than “city.” To be sure, “city”

will continue to be used, but its users are on notice that the term can obscure

as much as it reveals. In effect, the meaning of centrality as it concerns urban

space is being redefined (Sassen 2001).

Analyses of contemporary urban areas show that the geographic expansive-

ness made possible by technological innovations and the ability to plug in

more or less anywhere and anytime have had disparate effects on core areas.

Some urban areas – the larger, more globally connected – thrive more than

ever but with disparities in income and opportunities that are alarming in

some cases, less so in others (Fainstein 2001b). Middle-scale cities (population

about 100,000 to 500,000) struggle against the odds to keep a vibrant core

(Filion et al. 2004), while the cores of smaller cities may be emptied of retail

and other economic activities that disappear or relocate to the outskirts, where

taxes are lower and access by private vehicles is simpler. All of these develop-

ments require finding ways to reuse city cores because the newly emerging

urbanity brings different conditions but does not annihilate all physical signs

of previous ones. The centres of older cities, some of which predate the

Industrial Revolution, concretely propose forms for living and working in

close proximity. There are lessons to be learned about built form in those

spaces. What techniques can be used to adapt these spaces while opening

the city to innovative activities? What techniques can be applied to ensure

the pleasure of face-to-face communication and built form that respects the

physical features of proportionality, patterns, coherence, and so on, continues?

How can one best use existing patterns, generate extensions, fill holes, or

bridge the space between A and B? Retrofitting is essential because the use

of the core must change when a centre is no longer the service centre to its

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16 opening

periphery. Ongoing innovation and ingenuity are demanded in the practices

of urbanism.

This description of contemporary urban form connects to the book’s case

study in the next chapter, which describes the development of the core dur-

ing the industrializing period and the onset of uncertainty when the effects

of rapid suburbanization begin to alter the core in the late 1950s. Later chap-

ters describe the two proposed treatments that were developed in the mid-

1990s. By that decade, the proposals represented different responses to how

Toronto’s core had gradually changed in relationship to the rest of the region

and, more immediately, was changing under the pressure of economic reces-

sion and increased social problems. These changes were associated with

broader international conditions affecting Canada’s economy that had specif-

ic effects in downtown Toronto via national, provincial, regional, and metro-

politan policies, as would be the case in any location (see Donald 2002a,

2002b; Gertler 2001; Gertler et al. 2000).

Structure of Planning: Activities, Planners, and Frameworks

Planning is often called an art, a science, or a discipline. In my view, planning

is a field of practice in which people reflect on and suggest how to shape

and manage an area that is jurisdictionally defined. Urban areas are prime

examples. A field of practice brings knowledge and skills together with ideas

about better and worse ways to act, given the conditions the practitioner faces.

Planning is but one of the fields of practice engaged in urbanism. A field of

practice differs from a “discipline,” which is a term applied mainly by people

in educational circles to the sciences (social, physical, and biological) and

humanities. A discipline is an area of investigation, the purpose of which is

to better understand the subject matter, not to try to treat it. For instance,

geomorphology is a discipline devoted to studying the earth’s surface. The

discipline’s scholars seek to better understand the origins and transformations

of the surface of the earth to better predict outcomes or explain effects, not

to change the earth’s surface.

Brendan Gleeson’s (2003, 765) straightforward view of public planning

activity is that it takes three forms:

1 development control centring on the regulation of land uses and built environ-

ments at the local scale;

2 assessment of environmental and social impacts of proposed development

activity at the local and regional scales;

3 strategic planning involving the coordination of public and private investment

and of government regulation within particular spatial frames.

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17opening

Strategic planning includes generating planning policies that may appear in

various forms such as in official, strategic, and subarea plans. These policies

are future-oriented, spelling out actions needed in the short to medium term

to serve needs but simultaneously safeguarding opportunities for the long

term. Planning is more than land use regulation: it is more akin to inten-

tional interventions to influence land and building development (see, e.g.,

Brindley, Rydin, and Stoker 1989; Tiesdell and Allmendinger 2005). These

planning activities are carried out by conducting studies and having discus-

sions with those concerned about matters relevant to land and building

development.

To put some boundaries around planning, it is useful to note that not all

urban development outcomes are the results of formal planning. In some

cases planners recommend X, but Y is done; in others, no recommendation

is made using the accoutrements of planning – action comes out of someone’s,

or some group’s, sheer power to act.

The people I call planners fit either or both of the following criteria: (1)

they use the legal and other instruments of planning and are trained as plan-

ners or work in municipal or regional departments or private firms charged

with doing urban planning or (2) they are members of a professional plan-

ning body that accredits planners. These people accept the role and therefore

the responsibility for carrying out planning activities and contributing to the

planning framework. They are the ones whose conduct professional planning

institutes seek to hold accountable by various means, including registration,

licensing, codes of ethics, refresher course requirements, and so on. My def-

inition excludes people who simply comment on planning from the sidelines,

even though their often-critical assessments are welcome and vital to the

well-being of the field. Many people who speak from that position have

catalyzed changes to theory and practice (cf. Myers and Banerjee 2005).

I also distinguish the planning framework from planners and planning

activities. “The planning framework” is a collective term that refers to the

plethora of legislation, tools, and policies that inform land use practices in

a jurisdiction.9 Built up in response to the problems presented by rapid ur-

banization and industrialization, the planning framework, with a century of

usage under its belt, is deeply embedded in the administration of local and

regional governments. Its elements have been altered over time; however,

because the changes have been piecemeal, the framework that applies (at

least in the case at hand) continues to reflect its origins in the industrializing

period and planning styles developed since the late nineteenth century (Wolfe

1989; Healey 1983, 263). Changes around the framework’s edges have in-

cluded the formal planning framework’s adaptation to legislated measures

moore_milroy.indd 17 11/06/2009 11:53:37 AM

18 opening

to promote sustainable environments, to restore brownfields, to protect herit-

age, and so on.

It is essential to separate the framework from specific planning activities

because the framework forms the ground rules that everybody uses in a

jurisdiction, whereas planning activities can vary, provided they satisfy the

formal constraints of the framework. The planning framework can be and is

used not only by people designated as planners but also by politicians and

the whole development industry, including lawyers, architects, builders, and

others. A distinguishing feature of this case study is its illustration of how the

planning framework was used by the many people involved. This is rarely

elucidated by researchers who investigate planning practice. In this case the

planning framework’s importance to the outcome is inescapable. A society is

likely to be more invested in its planning framework than in its planners.

Indeed, planners do not have roles mandated for them in the framework,

although by convention their training and experience have come to accord

them opportunities to work with it on behalf of their employers and clients.

But if there were no planners at all, there would still be a land use planning

framework. The framework incorporates the basic or default planning process

and can serve as a stand-in when local processes are not in place. Appendix

1 offers a brief description of some features of the planning framework that

were relevant in this case.

The framework includes a set of legally binding requirements that govern

land development and to which all who participate in development must

adhere. These are not ethical standards. Ethical standards are the responsibil-

ity of the professional organizations of the various users of the planning

framework, whether they are planners, lawyers, or members of provincial

oversight bodies. The ground for judging a person’s legal right to act in a

proposed manner is one’s individual property rights interpreted in conjunction

with land use legislation that may constrain them.10 The arbiter in challenged

disputes among private owners and government bodies is most often a court

or tribunal with a mandate to serve the public interest. Tribunal decisions are

thus presumed to reflect the public interest, despite how hard a concept that

is to define or defend. The public interest is not a fixed concept. Because

elected city councils and appointed tribunals are the primary custodians of

the concept for municipal purposes, the public interest can shift as their

memberships change. The planning framework can be used to support a wide

range of projects because members of councils and tribunals can articulate

their ideological proclivities through its generalities.

The public interest is also tied to the concept of good planning, and for

the tribunal involved in this case, the two appear to be equivalent (Chipman

2002, 111). According to John Chipman’s (2002, 106) analysis of the Ontario

moore_milroy.indd 18 11/06/2009 11:53:38 AM

19opening

Municipal Board, before which the Yonge-Dundas case was heard, good plan-

ning falls under three broad themes: “conformity with approved planning

policies, impact and compatibility [of a development], and adequacy of process.”

Planning and Urbanism

The relationship between planning and urbanism is hard to sort out for many

reasons, and this is particularly the case in Canada. In Canada, in French, a

planner is an urbaniste or, occasionally, a planificateur, and planning may

be urbanisme, planification urbaine, planification rurale, or, in some circum-

stances, aménagement.11 In this book “planning” and “urbanism” are not used

synonymously. Using Giorgio Piccinato’s analysis (1987), Michael Hebbert

(2006) illustrates how planning in the British-American tradition differs from

urbanism in the Latin tradition. Canadian practices have roots in both Anglo

and Latin traditions, so both planning and urbanism are used. Despite the

difficulties that are raised by distinguishing them, the choice respects, first,

the origins of the term “urbanism” in the late nineteenth-century upheavals

of rapid urbanization and, second, its interpretation in an important land use

dictionary, Dictionnaire de l’urbanisme et de l’aménagement (Merlin and

Choay 2000). Here, “urbanism” is used to refer to reflection on and practices

directed to shaping and managing urban space using some combination of

normative ideas, data, and practicable actions. Over the years, different types

of practitioners – surveyors, engineers, architects, planners, and designers –

have dominated urbanism, and some have tried to carve off a chunk and treat

the part metonymically, as if it was the whole. To add to the confusion, the

tasks of various professionals have been inconsistent over time and across

jurisdictions.

Planners bring one bundle of knowledge and practices to urbanism. Their

tasks, as conventionally understood, were outlined earlier and mainly deal

with policy for overall urban development, research and evaluation, and

regulation. One can use planning to contribute to reflections on “the urban”

and to effect change, but one can also use urban design, engineering, and

financial savvy for the same purposes. Urbanism is a crowded field, but plan-

ning activities are expected to result in policies on land and built form and

in practices that lead to implementation. Once formal planning policies are

approved through the political process and carry the weight of statutory law,

other fields are expected to respect them. The scope of planning activities

can differ substantially from one jurisdiction to another.

To further complicate matters, “urbanism” as a term is used much less among

English speakers than among speakers of Latin-based languages, which is a

development that may have discouraged the formation of a broadly shared

understanding of the word.12 Despite the terminological difficulties, what other

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20 opening

word so aptly conjoins and contextualizes the work planners and others do

in contemporary urban areas?

Questions to Answer

I use the case study details to address two questions about planning practice

and one question about theories. My first concern was to learn how Toronto

ended up with a core area redevelopment scheme that sought to emulate the

new high-energy, razzle-dazzle “shoppertainment” venues that were being

built as urban development projects in the United States and Europe. I

wanted Torontonians to know how that had happened, especially given that

one of the project’s newer elements is the controversial, not-quite-public

public square. Thus, the first question is: How was urban planning practised

in this Toronto case? I wanted to see planning as it was, not as it should have

been. I answer the question by taking the long way around, by going through

as many byways as possible to show in detail what the planners actually did

and what tools, ideas, images, and arguments they used to arrive at and present

their views. I am referring here to planners who were either public-sector

employees working for the city, development consultants working on behalf

of the business lobby in the immediate area, or private-sector planners mak-

ing arguments for or against options.

As for the second question about practice, the deeper I found myself in the

project, the more it seemed to me that the project presented a complex and

not uncommon planning problem – that is, what to do with several blocks

of a declining street dominated by an enormous shopping centre in the

middle of an urban area. The story shows how planners approached the

problem and worked through it within a specific political context, with eco-

nomic conditions constantly changing, and while retailing was in a period of

massive reconfiguration. As mentioned, I discovered that there were two fully

developed plans: a street regeneration plan and a more aggressive redevelop-

ment project. I wanted people who are interested in urban planning and

related fields to see how the plans to fix this piece of a city changed and how

the arguments for the two different solutions were made so plausible that

both could be adopted. Given that the formalities of the planning framework

did not change in any way that affected this project between the regeneration

and redevelopment plans, the second question is: How did planners and

others reason their way to two different recommendations for the same geo-

graphic space? How were the justifications and rationalizations structured and

conveyed, quite literally, at the level of language? It seems to me that answering

this question would help make the planning function and what planners do

more understandable.13

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21opening

The chapters in which these two questions are answered are somewhat

like a planning manual because so many facets of planning in contemporary

space are touched upon: the use of various tools; the interconnections among

planners, politicians, municipal lawyers, and developers; the problems of

citizen participation in planning; and the eternal matter of poverty and how

plans affect the life chances of the least capable. These chapters pose a num-

ber of questions: How long is an economic cycle? What is a planning depart-

ment’s role with regard to supporting economic activity? Are reinvestment

incentives enough to kick-start regeneration? What is a planner to do with

too little data and too little time? Under what circumstances would another

city’s answer to a problem be a good answer for a problem in your city? When

does the law trump ethics? What is the range of options for a planner with a

strong sense of public duty? The Yonge-Dundas case provides an example of

planners trying to figure out which way to move.

The third question mainly concerns theories: How does a planned interven-

tion such as the one examined here correspond to planners’ theories about

their work? How did this planned outcome come about? What theory – or

combination of theories, procedural or substantive, explanatory or prescript-

ive – helps us interpret this outcome? The case does not fit so-called proced-

ural theories or what by convention are called simply “planning theories.”

Those are normative theories of process that describe what planners ought

to do to plan well. Indeed, the actions of the city’s planners during the re-

development phase would be found wanting against any normative theory.

On the other hand, the plan was approved and even praised by the city

council and the adjudicating tribunal, both of which formally represented the

public interest. How are we to square that fact with the injunctions of norma-

tive planning theory? Were the planners’ actions right or wrong? The case is

no better explained by substantive theories about urban phenomena, the so-

called urban theories.14

Planners and Their Theories

Planning involves not only practice but also theorizing. One stands back from

practice and asks questions about it. Those who do this and write up their

findings are mainly in academia or are independent writers interested in urban

matters, although practising planners occasionally write from a theoretical

perspective too. Matters that tend to be investigated include how planners

practise today compared to the past; why they practise as they do; the rela-

tionship between practice and outcomes; and how practice connects to theor-

ies and evidence about urban phenomena such as demographic changes,

economic growth and decline, and much more. The reasons for those kinds

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22 opening

of research are to provide observations on the role that planning practice

plays in the development of human settlements and to improve planning’s

rate of success, however success is defined (see, e.g., Campbell and Fainstein

2003, 2-4; Nigel Taylor 1998, 167-68). To do this kind of theorizing, research-

ers typically use a range of mainly social science methods such as interviews,

surveys, on-site observation, extrapolation from practice, and document an-

alysis. Two or more methods may be used jointly.

Research studies about how planners practise are different from those that

seek to show how planners ought to practise. While the two research ap-

proaches are not cleanly separable – for both can invoke images of norma-

tively desirable means and ends – the basic purposes behind them differ. The

first type of study mainly tries to show or explain actions that evidence con-

firms were taken, while the second seeks to illustrate the ethical correctness,

or lack thereof, of particular actions that may empirically have been taken or

may in theory be taken in the future. The research for this book was of the

first type and, broadly speaking, took the following route: examined practice

as actually carried out; noted the praise for it; and wondered why it was

praised, given that the practice departed from theories. The route for the

second approach, the road not taken here, would be something like this: start

with a normative theory of how practice should be done; check practice as

actually carried out; define the gap between theory and practice; and suggest

how to fix theory and practice so the two better coincide.

The relationship between Planning and Urban Social Science:

has the Analogue between Them Been overextended?

Cases like Yonge-Dundas have mainly been interpreted by using theories

from outside the planning field itself. Most often this has been via theories of

urban political economy. Urban development projects (UDPs), of which this

was an example, and urban development corporations (UDCs) were strategies

governments frequently used from the 1970s to reposition cities in the so-

called new economy (see, e.g., Bartley and Treadwell Shine 2002; Courcier

2005; Deas, Robson, and Bradford 2000; Fainstein 2001a; Gordon 1997; Mou-

laert, Rodriguez, and Swyngedouw 2002; Reichl 1999; Sagalyn 2001). Common

characteristics of UDPs include taking a parcel of land with investment po-

tential out of the usual regulatory regime (which might mean reducing de-

velopment controls and permitting actions to be taken without public

consultation) and allowing a wide range of options to be used to generate

action, often with the help of specific financial incentives to make it more

interesting for land developers to take up the challenge (including temporar-

ily reduced or waived property taxes). This is usually called property-led

development (Healey et al. 1992).

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23opening

Although examining projects using political economy theories and concepts

can provide many insights, it would not show, at least in this case, the con-

tributions made by planners, planning activities, or the planning framework.

Political economy theories swamp the actual practices of planners. They are

not substitutes for theories of planning. The cases cited above, for instance,

describe how politics and economics are articulated through UDPs, not how

the planning function is executed and what its effect is on the outcome. Even

regime theory, one of the most commonly espoused theories, would not

explain this case. An urban regime is defined by its originator as “the informal

arrangements by which public bodies and private interests function together

in order to be able to make and carry out governing decisions” (Stone 1989,

6). Stone (1993, 2) says regime theory “holds that public policies are shaped

by three factors: (1) composition of a community’s governing coalition, (2)

the nature of the relationships among members of the governing coalition,

and (3) the resources that the members bring to the governing coalition.” A

regime is place-specific, and uncovering the structure of a regime in a given

place should explain what occurs better than other explanations. For instance,

one might expect to find a significant amount of informal cooperation among

coalition members. In the Yonge-Dundas case this type of cooperation did

not materialize. Those who wanted to put up office buildings took up a pos-

ition in opposition to important retail property owners. (It is not unusual for

landowners with different capital investment interests to argue over develop-

ment.) Not only that, the two groups argued formally (not informally) over

the interpretation and use of the formal framework (e.g., the provisions of

the official plan and the community improvement plan).

Thus, the first issue this case raises has to do with the relationship of plan-

ning to the social sciences. Have planners overextended the analogue between

their field of practice and the social sciences? The most obvious reason why

urban social science theories cannot account for the role that planning, as a

field of practice, plays in urban development is that planning is not a social

science. This is widely acknowledged. But while theorists can momentarily

forget, practitioners caught in the fray never can. As a field of practice, plan-

ning deals with urbanism, the dynamics of urban life and space. Its job is to

find options for development that are plausible enough to be implemented.

Even the language used can be a problem: the social science theories that

planners use are sometimes collected under the single rubric “urban theory,”

which effectively reduces “urban” to those things that are amenable to inves-

tigation using the social sciences.

The social science theories most often used in conjunction with planning

describe space as being socially constructed through a variety of complex

and reciprocal relations and exchanges that involve money, power, gender,

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24 opening

ethnicity, and so on. That assumption has been very fruitful in social science

theorizing since the 1960s. However, its power also inhibits the contemplation

of space in any other manner, such as in terms of proportion, pattern, exten-

sion, or the spaces between things – in effect, principles that can be used to

generate spatial arrangements. Social science approaches to planning sub-

ordinate principles of spatial organization rather than allowing that they could

also generate good planned milieus.

Planning theories are at risk of being taken over – one might even say col-

onized – by social science perspectives in which the activity of planning is

conceptualized predominantly in terms of social science knowledge. When

the space that planners deal with is conceptualized as a matter of social pro-

duction with pre-established ends (making money, increasing social justice,

etc.), the concomitant metaphor or image at work is one of purposiveness,

of a design in which all the elements are to be brought under control of a

central body. The case described in this book illustrates how the overexten-

sion of the social science analogue inhibits the theorization of planners’

practices in other ways. Françoise Choay’s thesis on the enduring figures in

urban discourses, which I describe later, helps explain the significance of this

tendency to accept a kind of colonization of the field’s theories.

relationship of Process to Substance: Are They Divorced?

The second issue for theory that this case highlights is related to the point

just made: the perennially unresolved matter of how the process of planning

is linked to the substance of planning activities. The turn to urban social sci-

ence theories to bolster planning theory coincided with a period in the 1960s

when planning theorists decided to give precedence to the process of plan-

ning rather than its substance. This remains the principal orientation among

theoreticians of the field today.15 For many, planning theory has moved be-

yond divorcing process from content. However, I agree with Nigel Taylor

(1998, 152) who says that the distinction between procedural and substantive

planning knowledge, which was made by Andreas Faludi in 1973, lives on

and indeed represents a kind of “continuity in the development of planning

theory.”

My interpretation of the status of the planning theory divide is that the two

types of knowledge, procedural and substantive, that planners identified in

their work evolved into a binary and hierarchical relationship between those

two main terms. The dominant term is “procedure”: it gathers under its um-

brella knowledge about how planners should plan normatively, work with

data and other concerned people, and find opportunities and identify con-

straints.16 The subordinate term is “substance,” the repository of substantive

knowledge and theories about the things that planners plan – for example,

moore_milroy.indd 24 11/06/2009 11:53:38 AM

25opening

cities, regions, neighbourhoods, waterfronts, housing complexes, streets, and

so on. Today, “planning theory” refers by convention to procedural theory,

to just one part of the binary, however weakly or strongly procedural theory

is attached to substantive issues.

Procedural theories flow along two main channels, each of which has sev-

eral streams that are epistemologically and procedurally distinctive.17 Theories

in the channel that was developed first rest on concepts of rationality and

betterment. One expects the latter to be achieved by applying the former. For

planners, as for others, the terms “rationality” and “rational” raise endless

problems concerning what they mean in specific contexts and how they can

be used. For example, does “rational” describe decision-making processes in

which each step of the way is based on careful reflection rather than guess-

work, and for which the reasoning is made explicit so that it can be questioned

(Nigel Taylor 1998, 70) – in other words, instrumental rationality? Or should

the term be used to describe both the process of arriving at a decision and

the goal – so-called substantive rationality? Or is it something else altogether?18

Despite the fact that rational planning includes theoretical conundrums and

practices that cannot meet ideals, it has lived on. While it can take many

forms, it tends to refer to planning in which means and ends are logically and

justifiably connected and processes are reasonably transparent and consulta-

tive. It is associated with a series of steps to work from goals to options for

implementation. Rational planning, then, addresses some of the problems

manifested in urban and regional space by using knowledge generated rigor-

ously in fields such as economics, geography, demography, and sociology,

which its practitioners often combine with their own expertise in assessing

and solving urban problems. Rational planning is also known as rational

comprehensive, synoptic, managerial, deliberative, regulatory, or synthesizing

planning. Who carries out the steps may vary, but public planners are cen-

trally involved, as are people who are concerned about a given problem –

residents, corporations, social groups with minority interests to protect,

associations of homebuilders or environmentalists, or government agencies.

The planner’s expertise lies in bringing together knowledge from a number

of relevant areas and from people with interests in the matter at hand and

using the planning framework and practices imaginatively and appropriately

to arrive at recommendations.

A second major type of procedural planning theory emerged in the 1980s

to oppose rational planning. It challenged the epistemology and efficacy of

science- and expert-based approaches. Its various formulations incorporate

ways to question how a recommendation is being developed, who is involved,

whose interests are served and not served, and what knowledge is being used.

The planner establishes a process for communicating with those concerned

moore_milroy.indd 25 11/06/2009 11:53:38 AM

26 opening

about a given issue. Within that process, a degree of mutual understanding

is sought about the issues and relevant knowledge to be used to solve the

problem. Johan Woltjer (2000, 25-26) identifies consensus-oriented planning

processes as being of three main types, although they can and do overlap:

collaboration and learning, bargaining and negotiation, and persuasion and

will shaping. In consensual theory, the planner is a centre person, negotiator,

or facilitator with the task of developing a consensual outcome. The planner’s

expertise in procedure is crucial. The outcome is intended to incorporate the

local or specialist knowledge of participants affected by the plan and to gen-

erate their goodwill and cooperation in the final decision making and imple-

mentation. Like rational planning, this type of theory also has many names.

This highly simplified synopsis of what I collectively call consensual planning

disregards a host of epistemological differences among proponents of ap-

proaches such as communicative, collaborative, and consensus planning, as

well as equity, advocacy, and institutionalist planning.19 Theorists debate

whether it is sensible to pit rational theories against consensual theories as if

it was a matter of one or the other. Both rationality and consensus are (nor-

matively) desirable in a planning exercise; one should not be excluded in

favour of the other. Ernest Alexander (1998) makes this point in theory. Woltjer

(2000) tested it against six Dutch cases of infrastructure planning and con-

cluded that the combination is needed and, at least in his cases, was used in

practice.

Having long ago focused on process, planning theorists have continued to

debate how best to connect the substance of planning to the process of plan-

ning. The two lines of theorizing, rational and consensual, are basic replies

to that question. The first one uses reason to bring knowledge developed by

planners, who often lean on the work and experience of others, to bear on

a problem to reach the best option under the circumstances; the second one

uses theories and techniques of communication to work toward an option on

which people can agree. However, complaints have been raised about both

lines of theorizing; critics say that they have led to theory emptied of content,

which is the substance of what planning is all about – that is, city-regions and

the lives of people in them.

Three broad responses to the so-called emptiness of both lines of theor-

izing can be discerned. The first seeks to incorporate substantive matters by

tying planning theory to urban social science theories. Robert Beauregard

(1990, 211) is one for whom the “drift away from the physical city” is a deep

concern. He wants to return to the kind of city-centred planning theory that

“was about cities in a substantive sense ... inseparable from social reform”

(ibid., 210). The city-building process is planning’s theoretical object, he says,

and planning theory needs to be attached to it because it must be able to

moore_milroy.indd 26 11/06/2009 11:53:38 AM

27opening

show the benefits of a better city obtained through its practice. His city-

building process is described in social science terms – that is, a city is a

phenomenon amenable to analysis regarding progress using the social sci-

ences. Within Beauregard’s strategy, planning theory would be normative and

planners would admit to a political function and forget any claims to objec-

tivity. His brief article was part of a point-counterpoint symposium and his

fellow planner-respondents did not agree with his strategy because they saw

it as politically naive (Foglesong 1990, 215; Bassin 1990, 217; Brooks 1990,

219). Fifteen years later, Fainstein (2005) reasserted Beauregard’s point that

city planning does not make its objective clear. She goes further, however,

because she wants the purpose of city planning to be singular: “to create the

just city” (ibid., 121) that would recognize “the historical roots and justification

for planning” (ibid., 122). She too worries about the procedural-substantive

split in theories used by planners. She calls the first “planning theory” and

the second “urban theory.” She wants planning theory to be tied to urban

theory; otherwise, the objective of consciously creating a just city is unattain-

able because effective planning depends on its context (ibid.). When she

writes about theory, Fainstein derives context from urban social science.

Another effort to fix the problem of “substantively vacuous” planning theor-

ies seeks to embed procedural theory within urban social science theories.

Lauria and Whelan (1995, 8) describe planning theorists as having made a

full circle from the empty rational comprehensive theory of the 1950s to

empty communicative-style theories of the 1990s. For them, content in the

form of a theory about the socio-econo-political workings of cities is essen-

tial. In their view, this might be achieved by embedding procedural theory

in regime theory. However, as I have already suggested above, the result

smothers the actual practice of planning beneath the weight of abstract pol-

itical economy concepts. Allmendinger discusses the approaches proposed

by those who see the merit of a political economy orientation to address the

“contentlessness” of procedural theory. He concludes (2002, 66) by raising

serious doubt about “whether a more critically aware planning could do

without a methodology for making and implementing decisions.” Despite all

the insight that political economy approaches can provide, we still would

not understand planning if we had not studied actual planning practices.

Actual planning actions must be seen to be theorized inductively, not only

situated within political economy frameworks to be explained deductively.

Finally, others imply that the claim that procedure is divided from substance

is itself empty because the problem has been resolved by the newer planning

processes based on consensus, negotiation, and paying attention to institu-

tional relations. These processes are designed to recognize divergent views

about substantive issues and to propose a process that involves representatives

moore_milroy.indd 27 11/06/2009 11:53:38 AM

28 opening

of differing views. If the process is competently and fairly conducted, then

the result will be a solution to disagreements on substance. Thus, it is claimed,

a good process is the best route to a good outcome. Quality of process leads

to quality of place (Healey 2007, 1, 2). However, the assumption that the

problem has been resolved through a new type of process does not satisfy

all those who are concerned with this substance-process matter. Woltjer’s

(2000, 214-15) analysis of several Dutch cases that used consensual planning

shows that these processes did not necessarily produce “a society and en-

vironment with a ‘better quality’ than would be the case with a rational plan-

ning approach”: the selective participation of participants may be less ethical,

and these processes may yield “inadequate results in terms of sustainability,

consistency and cohesion.” Another example is Fainstein, who, as we have

just seen, claims that only by joining procedure and substance within a nor-

mative position on social justice can one figure out the desired outcome of

planning and whether one’s efforts are bearing fruit. To Woltjer’s and Fain-

stein’s concerns I would add two more. First, a public planner has a profes-

sional view about substance, and that view needs to be expressed at least as

strongly as any other view in a process. This cannot happen if the planner is

a fair – that is, neutral – process facilitator. Second, public planners are insti-

tutionally situated in such a way that, if they manage a process in which

development stakes are substantial, there is always the prospect that a polit-

ical solution will be invoked by elected officials who come in over their heads.

When that happens, a planner’s credibility as a facilitator is put into question,

while his or her knowledge about substance has not been a vital part of the

process. That is a lose-lose result. There is no doubt that planners need to

frequently participate in consensual processes; but the reason for being present

should be to bring planning’s contribution to urbanism to the table.

My view, which is corroborated by the case study, is that the problem of

putting process and substance together has not been solved, nor has it dis-

appeared. The substantive-procedural binary, with its hierarchical form in

which process ranks higher than substance, still exists, and theories continue

to be built on the binary, even though it is not acknowledged. In fact, I do

not believe there is a solution to the problem of putting substance and process

together. Rather, it is a tension that will always be present. The tension should

be recognized explicitly in planning theories. On the other hand, the hier-

archical placement of process over substance can be corrected, not by inver-

sion but by formally recognizing the value of both process and substance and

consciously deciding how to balance them on a case-by-case basis. In this

book, inspection of the planning practice in the selected case confirms the

potential for taking this approach. Going further still, the case supports a

reconceptualization of what counts as substance within urban planning.

moore_milroy.indd 28 11/06/2009 11:53:38 AM

29opening

Planner- and Planning-Centred Theories

The brief comments that describe rational and consensus styles of planning

theories indicate that, despite their different orientations, they share three

defining features:

1 They are first and foremost about planning and its processes; that is, they

are not about urbanism and regionalism, cities and regions, or environ-

ments and rural areas, which are secondary or implicit.

2 Planning is led and executed by public-sector planners. The public-sector

planner is at the centre of the action, including consensus-based ap-

proaches, where planners take charge of setting up the process and often

run or mediate it.

3 A planner is expected to be able to choose the planning process that will

be used.

In the redevelopment phase of the Yonge-Dundas project none of these

defining theoretical features were obtained, while in the regeneration phase

only item 2 applied: planning was led and executed by public-sector planners.

This leaves a large gap between theory and practice. In this case, actions were

not as planning-centred or planner-centred as theory suggests.

The data of this case show that economic and political arguments were

filtered through a discourse on urbanism, not planning. This applied to all

arguments, not simply those made by planners. Arguments may have stemmed

from economic, political, social, or planning interests, but their proponents

framed them within theories about cities that were implied rather than named

or defined. Thus, those with money or political power used urbanism as a

framing device to argue in favour of doing things one way rather than another.

Money and power holders did not successfully argue for an approach just

because they had the wherewithal to do so. Potentially self-serving demands

of the moneyed and the powerful were passed through a framework in which

urbanistic decisions were made, imperfect as the framework and those deci-

sions were. Even the Eaton Centre’s problem of a down-at-the-heels street

outside the door of its expensive property could not be addressed until the

Centre’s owners were prepared to enter into a discourse on urban space.

However, my claim about the use of urbanistic discourse is not naive. I am

not in any way discounting the fact that statements made in these circumstances

can be posturing, or even untrue, and made to bluff or wheedle things out

of others. I recognize that such statements by everyone concerned will most

often be deeply informed by self-interest. People’s motives are always com-

plex. My claim is that political and economic influences do not transcend all

others. The data illustrated to me that planning as a field of practice had a

moore_milroy.indd 29 11/06/2009 11:53:38 AM

30 opening

specific role in the Yonge-Dundas case, a role that was governed neither by

capitalists’ nor politicians’ interests. The impact of planning came largely from the skilful use of the planning framework by everyone, including planners.

In other words, with few exceptions, everyone had to don the discourse of

urbanism to some extent to have their interests in built space served. In the

Yonge-Dundas case, the planning framework, with all its accoutrements, in-

cluding the Ontario Municipal Board, which hears disputes about municipal

land, was used as the locus of debates about urbanism.

As a framing device, urbanism is represented in the policies and procedures

of the planning framework and consequently influences how planning is

actually done in practice. Urbanism has been and continues to have a disci-

plining influence on who does what and where they can do it. On the one

hand, innovation, by definition, is tamped down by disciplinarity. On the

other hand, if planners seek to innovate despite the disciplining frame, they

will want to know where openings are possible and how innovation is blocked.

On the first point, the growth of an urbanistic discourse based on attitudes

specific to the nineteenth century and later is widely recognized in a general

way. It relates to more ordered, built environments and the realization that

these bring advantages and drawbacks. Urbanistic discourse has become

public rather than confined to elites, as it was in previous centuries. Con-

sider the following contemporary statements on cities and urbanism.

Capitalism these last 200 years has produced, through its dominant form of

urbanization ... an urbanized human nature, endowed with a very specific sense

of time, space and money as sources of social power and with sophisticated

abilities and strategies to win back from one corner of urban life what may be

lost in another. And while it may be true that some are losers everywhere, the

vast majority find at least minor compensations somewhere while the rest find

solace and hope in the intricacy of the game. Every political movement against

the domination of capital must, at some point, confront such confusions. (Har-

vey 1989b, 199)

Good environment, as the economists would say, is an income-elastic good: as

people, and societies generally, get richer, they demand proportionately more

of it. And, apart from building private estates with walls around them, the only

way they are going to get it is through public action. (Hall 2002, 402)

Raphaël Fischler (1998, especially 395-403) describes the proliferation of

new norms and ideas of normality that have emerged over the last century

or so, especially the standards of need associated with the industrial and

welfare state. These needs brought about the creation of norms that underlie

moore_milroy.indd 30 11/06/2009 11:53:38 AM

31opening

the concept of “standard of living.” Yes, Fischler argues, the apparatuses that

were created and became part of the welfare state were flawed, but they car-

ried with them “a hope, an illusion perhaps, of basic universality and of

rudimentary equality” (ibid., 404). He asks: What exactly are we losing?

Paul Rabinow examined the role of norms and special terms in building an

urbanistic idea of society. For him, the process involved a piecemeal stripping

away by experts of “architectural, historical and social references in the name

of efficiency, science, progress, and welfare” (1989, 322). He calls the gradual

normalizing of activities in cities “middling modernism,” which names prac-

tices that lie between high culture (philosophy, architecture, art, science, and

politics) and the quotidian and engages people who might be called “techni-

cians of general ideas,” people like urban planners who invented and used

“the practices, discourses, and symbols of ‘social modernity’” (ibid., 9).

Those four statements capture the duality of urbanism, the tension within

which planners and others engaged in urbanism work. One outcome of in-

creased regulation has been the erection of a framework that is supported by

laws passed by governments made up of elected representatives and appointed

arbitrators. Egregious harm is mitigated; some discipline is demanded; but

many choices can still be made. The recognition of openings is essential.

That leads to the second point, innovation, and its tie-in with planning. For

help, I turn to Françoise Choay’s ([1980] 1997) thesis on the origin of urban-

ism as a discourse and theory. In her detailed study, Choay traced the emer-

gence of an autonomous discourse on the organization of city space back to

the early Renaissance. Discourse about city space became autonomous in

the sense that, for the first time, it was independent of religious, cosmo-

logical, military, or family structures. It was the beginning of a discourse on

city space per se. (Choay is careful to note that her analysis is specifically

Western in orientation.) She describes two fundamentally different ways to

build cities that emerged in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

One was via rules used to generate solutions in space; the other was via

models to be applied as solutions. She shows that the first arose in an archi-

tectural treatise, a study of urban spatial configurations that meet natural laws,

human needs, and aesthetics.20 The second emerged in the utopian form of

writing, which presents criticism of an existing situation counterpoised by its

solution in the form of a model of its opposite. Compared to the rules ap-

proach, the model approach entails mirroring and correction; the generation

of something altogether new “is always secondary, [because] it always pro-

ceeds from preliminary work on and against a given reality whose values are

to be inverted” (ibid., 150).21 The rules and model approaches have both

been in continuous use since their creation. Then, around the 1860s, those

two approaches started to be combined with science, and this combination

moore_milroy.indd 31 11/06/2009 11:53:38 AM

32 opening

was put to use to defend urbanistic actions. This amalgam is a third approach,

and Choay argues that it is in the theory of urbanism that the organization of

space comes to be defined in terms of scientific discourse (ibid., 233-34). It

was a distinctly new approach because instead of merely using technical and

later scientific data to inform city making or urbanism, this approach took its

form from scientific discourse. Choay details when each of the three ap-

proaches started, traces their continuation, and identifies their unique com-

bination of characteristics.

Before the third approach took form, there was a period, which Choay

calls pre-urbanism, during which disciplinarity began to be manifested in

urbanistic practices, attitudes, norms, and terminology. The medicalization of

society has been traced from the eighteenth century onward, and “the birth

of the clinic” approach, so fully illustrated in the work of Michel Foucault,

has contributed to an increasingly therapeutic attitude to urban matters. The

effects of medicalization were epistemological in the sense that the social

sciences began to “bear the imprint of the medical approach,” to adopt con-

cepts of normal and pathological, and to apply them to the social body, and

they were spatial in the sense that urban space was “subjected to the clin-

ician’s eye” (Choay [1980] 1997, 224, 225). Urban space became an object to

medicalize. Once design fell into the hands of scientists, buildings were cut

off from the aesthetic dimension, “whether it be realized through the or-

ganic unity of parts, the axiom of concinnitas, or ornamentation” (ibid., 225).22

Through this analysis, Choay shows that neither disciplinarity nor medical-

ization, both of which were shaping urbanism then and which continue to

do so now, was the result of economic imperatives alone. Urbanism has its

own distinct trajectory.

By the later nineteenth century, the theory of urbanism amalgam began to

appear in urbanistic writings. It sometimes comprised a hyperspatialized,

utopian critique and solution, together with pretensions to scientificity that

were used to show that the critique leads to the solution or the reverse – that

the solution will solve the problem identified in the critique.23 The result was

a scientific theory of urbanism. While both the critique and the solution may

be well devised, one leads to the other only through political and ethical

choice, not through science. Choay cites a series of texts in which this pattern

is found and begins with the text that she analyzed in the most detail and

considers the very first text that employed the theory of urbanism – Ildefons

Cerdá’s Teoría general de la urbanizacíon, the title of which inspired Choay’s

name for this third figure.24 Cerdá’s text has qualities similar to other works,

including Camillo Sitte’s Der Städtebau, Arturo Soria y Mata’s La ciudad lineal,

Ebenezer Howard’s Tomorrow, Tony Garnier’s Une cité industrielle, Le Cor-

busier’s La ville radieuse, Frank Lloyd Wright’s The living city, Paolo Soleri’s

moore_milroy.indd 32 11/06/2009 11:53:38 AM

33opening

Archology, and Christopher Alexander’s Notes on the synthesis of form. To this

list could be added Kevin Lynch’s Good city form, one of the most appreci-

ated books in planning schools. Its first two parts, “Values and cities” and “A

theory of good city form,” are important in their own right; however, one

does not depend on the other for its logic. In these books we find elements

of both the “rule” and “model” figures, combined with variably-sized dollops

of science, social science, and scientism (excessive belief in or the misplaced

application of the scientific method), which are introduced to try to solve

urban problems. Because the built-form solutions are sometimes claimed to

be normatively in the best interests of the society, as supported by scientific

evidence, the choice is rendered normatively scientific, which is a contradic-

tion in terms.

If Choay’s argument that these figures have endured is correct, we could

expect to find signs of them in the mundane outputs of practice, such as

reports and presentations, bylaws, legislation, and so on. I explore this hy-

pothesis further in the final chapter, where I discuss two completely different

orientations to urban space in the case study. The first, which occurred in the

regeneration phase and hinged on the question, What is this place? tends

toward the use of some generative rules and principles. By contrast, the

second, which occurred in the redevelopment phase, responded to the issue

by providing a model, which, although developed elsewhere, was supposed

to be capable of delivering in this new location the mirror opposite of existing

conditions. This second orientation effectively closed down innovation in that

space.

We usually read that contemporary urban planning was prompted into

existence by a number of social and pathological conditions associated with

nineteenth-century cities. The descriptions rarely connect that newly growing

planning enterprise to earlier discourses on space. Consequently, the extent

to which the nineteenth-century ideas from which planning emerged were a

transgressive and disruptive force in an already existing discourse on building

urban space is missed (Choay [1980] 1997, 3). The idea that planning was

only or could only ever be therapeutic, utopian, or a force for doing good

emerges from this truncated perspective on the history of urbanism. We dis-

regard or have forgotten other ways. One significant aspect of Choay’s con-

tribution to understanding planning is its reminder of the dangers of

carelessly reproducing utopian models, a specialty of industrialism, because

they displace spatial principles that have potential for innovation.

We end up face to face again with the problem of how to glue process and

substance together in planning, but we now have new insight into the origins

of the problem and ways to address it. Françoise Choay shows modern urban-

ism (including planning) disrupting a discourse on space, not starting one. A

moore_milroy.indd 33 11/06/2009 11:53:38 AM

34 opening

framework for interpreting planning qua planning can be glimpsed, one that

gives room to its spatial concerns, its utopian analyses, and its pretensions to

social science validity – but with a reminder to be wary of how they are

combined.

To What Does “Planning” Refer?

The term “planning” aggregates distinctive elements, including planning ac-

tivities, planners who work in both the public and private sectors, and the

planning framework. Leaving these elements aggregated muddles attempts

to understand theories that have been developed about planning activity,

planners, and urban development. Because the parts can function independ-

ently of one another, to some extent, it is important to pay attention to which

part is in play. Analyses can be plain wrong if the distinctive elements sub-

sumed under the term are treated together. For instance, in this case, planning

is done without planners, although the term normally implies that planning

is carried out by planners; planning’s legal and administrative framework is

used by everyone, not only planners, because it establishes the rules of en-

gagement for all planning matters, not only for planners; and planning activ-

ities are carried out by planners and by others. Planners can influence the

framework and actions but not control them.

A second problem is that when planning is treated as a bundle of undiffer-

entiated elements, distinctions between public-sector and private-sector plan-

ners, as well as between planning for public-sector interests versus planning

for private-sector interests, are obscured. The common element is the plan-

ning framework. Private- and public-sector planners with training and exper-

tise have the right to present positions to councils and adjudicating bodies.

However, the notion of public interest is usually more constrained for private-

sector planners: their employers’ actions concern a site, not the larger urban

tissue, and a shorter rather than longer time frame. Consequently, their inter-

pretations of the public interest will often diverge. The best reason to have a

strong official plan (or comparable policy document) that clearly states the

direction in which the municipality wishes to head is so that a defensible

policy framework exists against which to assess individual options, applica-

tions, and recommendations. It probably would not hold up to every challenge,

but without it the chance of planners being able to justify an opinion on a

development is much reduced.

Finally, when planning is treated in the aggregate,planners can become

scapegoats for what people do not like about land development. In the Yonge-

Dundas case, planners and planning activities were the butts of hostility ex-

pressed by various people toward constraints on actions. If private-sector

interests or the ward councillor wanted to do something that was out of

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35opening

bounds, planners were often said to be the ones laying on the restrictions or

snuffing out initiative and innovation. In reality, restrictions are not applied

by planners; they emerge from the application of the planning framework

that, as discussed, is developed and maintained collectively and is not con-

trolled exclusively by planners. We tend to forget that planning activities are

governed largely by legislation, influenced by elected representatives, and

tested at law, and that planners try to find plausible options within that scope,

often amid a pandemonium of interests. Furthermore, planners recommend.

Politicians decide. However, if planners’ proposals lack imagination and in-

novation, it is a genuine problem for which they are responsible and that they

need to tackle.

Each of these four issues – overextension of the social science analogue,

the process-substance relationship, planner- and planning-centredness, and

imprecision about planning referents – raises a different question about how

adequately a case such as this can be described or explained using existing

procedural and substantive theories.

Investigative Approach

There is considerable debate about how to connect procedural theory, which

is conceptualized as planning theory, to substantive theory, which is presented

as urban theory. My aim in this research was to describe planning, as practised

in the vicinity of Yonge and Dundas, in a way that could shed light on this

debate. I did not want to marshal facts and fit them into existing theories,

because I was interested in both process and substance, which at this time

are split into different theoretical realms. The best way to loosen the grip of

conventional interpretations while maintaining the ability to ask new questions

and find new insights is deep immersion in the details. That is the route I

have taken here, and I expressly disregarded, as much as I could, all of the

planning theories and structured social science–based urban theories about

what was going on during the immersion. I do not say this naively, assuming

I have no biases, but rather to emphasize that I did not start with any of the

conventional structural theories to explain what I found. I readily declare my

bias toward democratic, open, and fair processes, toward urban form that is

carefully scaled and contextualized and aesthetically interesting, and toward

urban form that facilitates the pursuit of people’s hopes and dreams.

To describe this poststructural approach, it may be helpful to compare it

to more readily recognized structural approaches. Structuralism takes as a

given the “thereness” of structure. The structuralist’s task is to identify struc-

tures and show how they are constructed, whether by type (e.g., economic,

social, political, or philosophical), by characteristics (e.g., strength and how

parts interconnect), or by effects (e.g., rules, decisions, influence, and the

moore_milroy.indd 35 11/06/2009 11:53:38 AM

36 opening

capacity to command). Structuralists posit the existence of a structure that in

principle is knowable. A structure provides constraints and possibilities for

thought and action. It provides the range of logic within which actors act. But

a structure is created reciprocally so that it places ranges on people’s actions,

and those actions, in turn, affect the structure’s features. Structural approach-

es include social constructionism, structure-agency, institutional analysis,

contemporary capitalist economy structural theories, and earlier approaches

such as structural functionalism, Marxist and neo-Marxist analyses, and clas-

sical and neoclassical economics. Regime theory, referred to above, is a

structural theory.

Structuralism claims to provide ways to objectively analyze sociocultural

phenomena, without recourse to transcendental elements – that is, phenom-

ena beyond the material universe – to explain them. It has gradually sup-

planted conventional science as the principal approach to studying

on-the-ground social practices. Its approaches are not objective in the way

that the scientific method is said to deliver replicable findings relatively un-

tainted by observational bias; rather, they are systematic in that a researcher

can reliably identify phenomena and validly assess their meanings because,

in principle, other students of a given structure could repeat a study and ar-

rive at similar conclusions. Producing relatively objective analyses of structures

in this way has become widely accepted in the academy.

It is precisely on the structuralist claim that a structure can provide rela-

tively objective truth that poststructuralists bring their challenge. The latter

contend that structuralists, by seeking meaning via the concept of structure,

have exchanged the anchor of truth – called God in earlier times, and science

more recently – for the anchor of structure. Poststructuralists say that anyone

who tries to illustrate this objectivity will find himself or herself enmeshed in

metaphors and contingent meanings, never arriving at objectivity but remain-

ing situated in a cultural soup of meanings. Poststructuralists do not try to rise

above structure (as the “post” might suggest) but to think through it, primar-

ily by not giving it life as a centre, or as a presence, which proposes the

existence of something else that is absent. “Post” in “poststructuralism” does

not imply a subsequent time period, either. It signifies an approach that does

not assume that structure is a thing with a form evidenced by the obvious

pronouncements of central figures through their practices and texts. The

poststructuralist seeks to critically reflect on the dynamics of structuring, such

as by asking how this field of practice or argument is being structured. Like

structuralism, poststructuralism is loosely associated with various ways of

reading human activities to make them more open to reflection. Some ex-

amples are genealogy, as developed by Michel Foucault; deconstruction, as

developed by Jacques Derrida; and mimesis, as developed by Luce Irigaray.

moore_milroy.indd 36 11/06/2009 11:53:38 AM

37opening

In contrast with structuralism, poststructuralism has not been well received

in the academy except in very weak forms. The strong forms severely chal-

lenge the objectivity of structure building among structuralists. Certainly,

planning has very few examples. In poststructural approaches the focus is as

much on what is absent as on what is present, on “not” as much as “is.” There

is no fundamental order, logic, or truth; rather, the assumption is made that

people organize knowledge into structures at various times and for various

purposes, including to convey order, logic, and truth. Each structure has flaws,

the main flaw in every case being that a feature essential to the coherence of

the structure will, on examination of the structure, be found to have been

ignored or treated as if it was inconsequential. Thus, the coherence of the

structure is called into question. For example, public-sector planners build

the structure of their field on the claim that it serves the public interest. How-

ever, at the heart of the practice of planning are private interests that need to

be recognized, tamed, encouraged, and so on. After all, cities are built

largely from private capital and interests. The task of planners is not only to

make plans on paper but also to make plans that generate and guide imple-

mentation. A plan without reasonable potential for follow-through is not much

of a plan. This was one of John Friedmann’s (1969) early contributions: that

planning is not simply about decisions but also about action. However we

look at that task (aside from a Marxist perspective), planners are hooked in

some fashion to the market and its private interests because that is where

most development comes from. Based on the kind of actions it must engage

in to do its work, the structure of planning cannot be as coherent as some

claim it to be if private interests are not recognized as part of its structure

(Milroy 1989).

Poststructuralists try to understand how and why a particular truth, logic,

or order is promoted and to inquire into what it leaves out and why. A new,

also flawed, logic ensues, but it is one that better accounts for how power

works in a given circumstance. We do not solve the problem of power; we

keep reworking it. It is a hard approach to sell because people generally do

not like the feeling of eternal openness. However, insights gained from work-

ing with the approach can be profound and can be used in various ways. In

this case the question that emerged from attempts to interpret the data is, why

are principles of spatial organization left out of theorizing planning?

Complaints are repeatedly levelled against poststructural approaches to

dismiss them as irrelevant. One concern is that economics and politics should

be the important factors in the pursuit of justice and equitable cities. Econom-

ics and politics are “real” and, thus, where the focus for researchers should

lie. They are serious, politically engaged, and where the work happens. By

contrast, poststructural approaches are often inaccurately reduced to discourse

moore_milroy.indd 37 11/06/2009 11:53:38 AM

38 opening

analysis, which is represented as frivolous, peripheral, and unable to lead to

action. Most damning of all, poststructural approaches are called apolitical.25

On the contrary, poststructural analyses can be deeply political, for they can

question even what passes for political.26

Another complaint is that poststructural approaches are nihilistic because

there is no conclusion from the findings. It is true that there is no conclusion.

But this does not lead to nihilism. The findings undoubtedly demonstrate that

we are always in a soup of meanings, habits of thought, and regulatory devices

– we do not escape them. But we can make them more obvious to ourselves

so as not to be taken in by them. This is where poststructuralism excels. What

is done to change habits, and so on, becomes everyone’s responsibility.

Both structural and poststructural approaches are useful for those who

want not only to understand but also to change the status quo. One might

hazard to say that structuralists believe they can find the levers that, if ad-

justed, would increase social justice – for example, finding the right way to

connect the planning process to substance. Poststructuralists believe that

exposing how levers come into effect and are valued provides people with

the kind of knowledge they need to expose injustice that parades as justice

– for example, revealing the origin and evolution of the utopian model in

planning that when reproduced obviates hard analysis and innovation. Those

who work in a poststructuralist vein, more so than structuralists, leave no

doubt that thinking subjects must do the hard work to change practices. The

choice I made to use a poststructuralist approach in this instance does not

deny the potential value of a structuralist one to investigate other facets of

the same case.

Methods and Sources

My research began in 1999. The primary method used for the case study was

document analysis. Because the development was challenged by owners of

some of the properties to be expropriated, there was a lengthy quasi-judicial

hearing at which evidence was presented and arguments were made. That

public hearing left extensive records of the formal planning of and legal argu-

ments for and against the Yonge-Dundas development. Technically, the hear-

ing was before a Joint Board because both planning and expropriation

matters were being contested. However, in this case, both of the hearing of-

ficiers were from the Ontario Municipal Board roster. I read the hearing

documents at the offices of the Ontario Municipal Board over two separate

periods between June 1999 and August 2001. Nik Luka, in his capacity as a

postgraduate research assistant, helped me with that task. I also read news-

paper reports on the project. I examined planning legislation, official plans,

and economic studies of Toronto; attended selected meetings of the downtown

moore_milroy.indd 38 11/06/2009 11:53:38 AM

39opening

community council of the new post-amalgamation Toronto; and reviewed the

literature on contemporary core-area redevelopment that emphasized the

experiences of cities that used similar combinations of public space, shopping,

and entertainment as were being proposed for Yonge-Dundas. In addition, I

reread a great deal of the literature on planning theories and planning practice

to ponder them in the specific context of this case. Nik Luka also searched

local histories to determine where Toronto’s “heart” was in different periods

and by whose definition, and he found records of earlier attempts to fix up

this section of Yonge Street. Using that information, he wrote the first version

of Chapter 2, “History,” which I have altered considerably.

After reading and analyzing the information and writing the first draft of

the study, I tested, corrected, and extended my information by conducting

interviews with twelve people who were centrally involved in the case. With

the exception of the ward councillor, who holds public office, these interviews,

which were conducted and tape-recorded between June 2003 and June 2005,

were done on the basis of confidentiality and the nonattribution of quotes. I

was greatly helped by the insights of these people, and I have tried to capture

them in the text. However, their voices are buried so that statements cannot

be identified with individuals. I am very grateful to the interviewees for the

generous amount of time they gave me and for their spirit of candidness,

especially given that they could not know how I would interpret their views

and actions. My hope is that I have been both accurate and fair.

In my discussion of planning tasks and planners, I have often used a pos-

ition title or general role instead of the person’s name. The decision to use a

name has been based on whether it was possible to adequately indicate the

source of a point of view, data, analysis, proposal, and so on. However, the

names of journalists, companies, and organizations are generally used if they

are the authors of documents. The rationale for my overall approach is that

the study is not about specific people but about planning as a function, with

its tasks, tools, structures, and specialists, all of which are embedded in the

larger context of urbanism.

I offer this case as an instance of planners tackling an urban problem in a

specific historical and spatial context. Critical analyses of it will lead to differ-

ent judgments about the quality of the planners’ contributions. The case is

offered for just that purpose, so we can learn and better bridge theory and

history by knowing the actions of planners (Fischler 1995).

Chapter by Chapter

Chapter 2 concerns the history of the study area. It focuses on five events

between 1950 and 1990, each of which altered how Yonge Street was able to

function in the context of the city as a whole. It sets the stage for the next

moore_milroy.indd 39 11/06/2009 11:53:38 AM

40 opening

five chapters, which begin in 1994 with the regeneration ideas that would

subsequently be transformed en route to implementation. We see the problems

the city was up against, and there is little doubt that this was a difficult area

to treat. Chapter 2 also illustrates how rhetoric was used in this case. Rhetoric

is an important tool in the promotion of redevelopment projects. The geo-

graphical location in question was identified as the heart of Toronto. The

heart was said to be in disgraceful condition. If the heart was failing, then the

city was inevitably on its way downhill. Indeed the predicted fate would

spread through the whole region because was not Toronto, in turn, the heart

of the region? Surely such a dire analysis calls for immediate, decisive action.

Whether Yonge-Dundas was ever really the heart of Toronto is disputable.

However, it was on the edge of the heart in the city’s early days, and it was

one of several hearts more recently. Facts did stop heart imagery, which began

to appear around 1996, from being used, nor have they since – which is the

very point of rhetoric. That is, whether Yonge-Dundas was ever the heart of

Toronto does not really matter. What matters is whether that rhetorical flour-

ish could serve the purpose of persuasion.

Chapter 3, “Regenerating,” describes the city’s plan, which began in 1994,

to regenerate the few blocks in question with a range of relatively modest

initiatives. This multifaceted approach went through standard planning pro-

cesses that began with involving affected businesses, citizens, and many

others. Reports about the steps that were being taken went through the well-

established committee and council approval stages. The chapter lays out the

reasoning for this strategy and what it entailed, details the main points of the

studies and reports, and identifies significant players who were involved in

reaching decisions about actions for this area.

Chapter 4, “Redeveloping,” discusses the parallel planning process that

came from the private sector and was championed by the ward councillor.

The city was persuaded to join its efforts to the private one in a loosely de-

vised public-private partnership. Initiatives from this new planning arrangement

overtook the regeneration project and converted it into a large-scale redevel-

opment. This project was developed in secret. It involved taking a dozen

private properties, selling six of them at cost to a private developer to build

a specific structure, and using four for a city-constructed public square (two

properties were intended for other related purposes). The chapter describes

the characteristics of the land parcels, how development options were gen-

erated and costed, the planning issues that were under review during the

approval process, and other technical matters that related to requests for

proposals, revisions to the official plan, the zoning bylaw, and the use of

sections of the provincial Planning Act.

moore_milroy.indd 40 11/06/2009 11:53:38 AM

41opening

Because this redevelopment project was challenged, and because property

expropriation was involved, a quasi-judicial hearing was required to settle the

dispute as to whether the project should proceed. The hearing produced

extensive written records that detailed how proponents conceptualized and

defended the project and how opponents argued that it contravened good

planning practice, if not the law. Thus, Chapter 5, “Defending,” offers a de-

tailed description of the planning and legal arguments that were put forward

in support of or against the redevelopment. It provides an excellent occasion

to see the connections among planning actions, planning legislation, and

various actors.

Once the project received all formal clearances in the latter part of 1998,

implementation began and has been underway since. Chapter 6, “Imple-

menting,” describes the development taking shape in ways that were not

always expected, given the arguments made in the course of promoting it.

The chapter discusses the new public square, the redevelopment around the

square and in the improvement area as a whole, the institution of the new

Business Improvement Area organization and how it expresses its interests

in the square and surrounding area, and where the problems that were not

solved went to.

The last chapter, “Closing,” is situated within the crucible of evolving con-

temporary urban form (as described in the first chapter), in which a com-

bination of technological, economic, and social changes are at work, and in

which the issue of the relationship between expansive urban development

and small spaces needs renewed attention from urbanists. I address questions

about the correspondence, or lack of it, between the practice described in

the case and current theorizing about planning practice by referring to four

issues: (1) the overextension of the social science analogue, (2) the process-

substance relationship, (3) planner- and planning-centredness, and (4) impre-

cision about planning referents. The conclusion put forward is that the

decision made by planning theorists to accentuate process over substance has

kept eyes focused on planning per se and away from the larger question of

urbanism, and this choice has exacerbated the tendency to focus on space

only as a product of social relations. In the face of major urban reconstruction

challenges beginning in the 1980s, the connection of procedural theories to

urbanism was fraught with difficulties. Those actors who were prepared to

fix tattered urban spaces could step over planners and their traditional ap-

proaches to use the elaborate planning frameworks that had been put

together over many decades of the twentieth century. Many planning practi-

tioners have since been drawn into the new work of urbanism. Practices

changed. Theory has not caught up.

moore_milroy.indd 41 11/06/2009 11:53:38 AM

CHaPter 2 historyWith Nik Luka

Predicting a city’s imminent heart failure is a common strategy when a group

wants support for an action. We saw it in Berlin during the rebuilding of

Potsdamer Platz (Sewing 2000) and in New York during the Times Square

redevelopment (Reichl 1999, especially chap. 3). Speaking generally, using

the theme of rise and decline to appeal to emotions is prevalent in city de-

velopment literature (Beauregard 1993; Ward 1997b). The emotional impact

is achieved with considerable effect through the use of metaphor, a semantic

structure that is used widely to interpret something unknown in terms of

something known. The use of an image like impending heart failure – even

though it is blatantly metaphorical and therefore readily seen as somewhat

exaggerated and not quite correct – can nonetheless become compelling

enough to spur action aimed at diverting that danger, even in what is technic-

ally not a heart at all.

Toronto’s case falls into this type of experience. The intersection of Yonge

and Dundas was described both as the heart of Toronto and as a rotting core.

Even if both claims were exaggerated, the imagery had an effect on the re-

development process. Yonge Street as a whole is central to life in Toronto,

but this particular intersection with Dundas Street was not important until the

Eaton Centre opened in the late 1970s. Even that event spread no prestige to

Dundas, east or west of Yonge, or to Yonge Street itself. In this chapter we

review the evolution of these streets in the context of the heart and rot meta-

phors since these are the images used by the project’s proponents.1

The corner of Yonge and Dundas was described as the heart of the city in

at least three respects. Each description is a little bit accurate, but only a little

bit. First, the corner was said to have been the historical core of shopping

and entertainment in Toronto. The members of the Ontario Municipal Board

(OMB), hearing the case for expropriation, accepted the idea that Yonge-

Dundas had once been a shopping and entertainment mecca for Torontonians.

moore_milroy.indd 42 11/06/2009 11:53:38 AM

43history

In its decision to allow expropriation to proceed, it said: “During the 1950s

and 1960s, Yonge and Dundas was ‘the’ retail shopping strip, the people

place, where the sidewalks were full of people, the retail stores, restaurants

and movie theatres vibrant and successful” (Joint Board 1998k, 3). A news-

paper journalist who specializes in Toronto issues expressed the same view

when writing about the Dundas Square project: “With luck, the project will

turn back the clock to the days when people came to Yonge and Dundas to

find the latest fashions or to catch a show” (Immen 1998a). It continues to

form part of the story as it is described on the Square’s website. This image

was not quite accurate.

Second, Yonge and Dundas was described as a symbol of the well-being

of the entire city and even the region. At the 1998 public hearing into expro-

priations for the redevelopment, a prominent private-sector planner in To-

ronto said that “the low-rise retail strip in the area of Yonge/Dundas is the

most important in the region, and its location by the Eaton Centre makes the

strip functionally and symbolically important in the region” (Joint Board 1998h,

14). The City of Toronto’s planner for the area used more subtle phrasing

without emphasizing the specific intersection, saying, “There is a fundamen-

tal incongruity between the street’s overall diminished role and appearance

and the notion that Yonge Street is viewed as Toronto’s main street and the

‘front door’ to visitors to the City” (Joint Board 1998b, Exhibit 69, 7). Another

frequently used idea or phrase, which was first expressed in 1996, was that

Yonge Street’s condition was central to the city’s “health, image and sustain-

ability” (see, e.g., ibid., 23). The well-being of the city, if not the region, was

said to depend on the successful redevelopment of this small area.

Third, Yonge-Dundas was called a focal point for public life and major

celebrations and was acclaimed as such by “the people.” The area planner

argued at the public hearing that this intersection was “the location of City

celebrations, protests and gatherings and has national and historic importance

as a visual symbol of downtown Toronto” (Joint Board 1998b, Exhibit 69, 9).

But there was a bit of slippage regarding the location. Throughout the city’s

history, celebrations, parades, and events have indeed taken place on differ-

ent parts of Yonge Street. As early as 1837, a stretch well north of the intersec-

tion was the scene of a brief but legendary armed rebellion led by William

Lyon Mackenzie, a newspaper editor and Toronto’s first mayor. But in the

1850s, ’60s, and ’70s, King Street, which runs perpendicular to Yonge and lies

about one kilometre south of Dundas, usurped Yonge’s place as the street for

public demonstrations, including those that marked Queen Victoria’s birthday

in 1854 and Canadian Confederation in 1867, the funeral cortège for the

Compact sympathizer Bishop John Strachan in 1867, and the mobbing of a

Fenian by Orangemen in 1878 (Fleming 1996). The intersection of King and

moore_milroy.indd 43 11/06/2009 11:53:38 AM

44 history

Yonge streets then became the focal point for celebrations – Queen Victoria’s

Diamond Jubilee in 1897, British success in the Boer War in 1902, and the

armistice of the First World War in 1918. At that time Dundas did not even

intersect with Yonge.

Large stretches of Yonge Street served as parade routes throughout the

twentieth century, for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth in 1939, for cir-

cuses, Santa Claus, anti–Vietnam War demonstrations, and so on. The massive

Pride Parade annually takes over Yonge Street from Bloor Street south to

Gerrard. Spontaneous celebrations are also associated with Yonge. A re-

spected observer of the city and its places noted: “There is a venerable To-

ronto tradition of crowds taking over Yonge Street for a night of merry

wildness on special occasions, usually victories in sport” (Mays 1994, 198).

In the early 1990s, crowds marked the victory of the city’s Major League

Baseball team, the Toronto Blue Jays, in the World Series by filling large

stretches of Yonge all the way north past Lawrence Avenue. James Lemon

(1985, 151) noted that hundreds of central city residents came to Yonge Street

in 1971 to celebrate the provincial government’s decision to halt the construc-

tion of the Spadina Expressway, which would have required the demolition

of hundreds of houses and the destruction of stable inner-city neighbourhoods.

Finally, crowd hooliganism has also been associated with Yonge, notably

against Greek restaurateurs in 1918 (Gallant 2004) and, reportedly, in response

to the Rodney King incident in Los Angeles in 1992. In the latter case, a num-

ber of white police officers in Los Angeles had been videotaped apparently

beating a black motorist. When charges against the officers were dismissed,

there were riots in central Los Angeles and outbursts of anger elsewhere,

including in Toronto.

These types of events took place, and continue to take place, over different

stretches of Yonge Street. Yet the heart of the city was claimed by project

proponents to be, quite precisely, at Yonge and Dundas. As a final point, it

is worthwhile to note that celebration, organized or spontaneous, has been

associated with movement through space, not with a fixed place. Peter Goheen

has argued that for nineteenth-century Torontonians the street, not the square,

was the focal point for demonstrations, regardless of whether they were for-

mal, informal, or mob-like. However, other public spaces could be used as

adjunct spaces. Adjunct spaces “served both for public assembly and speech-

es associated with parades and occasionally as turf for riots. All were cen-

trally located public open spaces, and hence governed by many of the same

protocols of access and control” (Goheen 1993, 142).

The observations that were made in association with the redevelopment

plans established a picture of a rotting heart that could be, and indeed had

to be, repaired to keep the city from collapse, from presenting a poor image

moore_milroy.indd 44 11/06/2009 11:53:38 AM

45history

to the world, and from unsustainability. The rotting heart became a metaphor

for the perceived deterioration of Toronto, which had been walloped by the

deep recession and economic restructuring that took place between 1989 and

1994. The redevelopment was held up as a harbinger of whether Toronto

would be world-class or ordinary.

The following discussion explores the history of lower Yonge Street and

the Yonge-Dundas intersection to give a sense of their importance, or lack

thereof, over the years. The street-related enterprises in the area in question

gradually changed from sober butchers, haberdashers, milliners, and house

painters to clothing retailers, taverns, tea rooms, restaurants, and cinemas to

fast-food outlets, game arcades, massage parlours, electronics retailers, and

souvenir stores. Much of what was happening to the retail and commercial

segment of the street was tied to the large-scale influences that came with

post–Second World War growth: the city’s form shifted from being mono-

centric (centralized transit and pedestrian shopping) to being polycentric

(decentralized, car-oriented shopping). This change was happening all over

Canada and the United States.

However, the case study was also distinguished by a specific condition.

The T. Eaton Company, which had been a major employer in the city in the

first half of the twentieth century, owned a large proportion of the land in

the subject area on the west side of Yonge between Queen and Dundas and

at Yonge and College. It was a family-owned business that originated in

Toronto but eventually established itself Canada-wide. Its Toronto activities

were primarily department store retail, catalogue sales, and product manu-

facturing (mainly clothes). Family members were wealthy and carried on in

a semi-regal fashion. In its later years, Eaton’s had weak leadership and shoddy

vision, which hobbled the company and prevented others from being able

to reorganize Yonge Street’s activities in the face of large-scale changes to

this industrial-era city.

Toronto’s city government had a mixed relationship with this powerful

company. On the one hand, it was well aware of Eaton’s importance as an

employer and taxpayer; on the other, city government had to struggle to deal

with its power. It had a strong tendency to side with Eaton’s, but, as we will

see as the story progresses, citizen actions derailed some of Eaton’s worst

plans. In the end, the fifth generation of the family brought the company

crashing into bankruptcy. This occurred in 1997-98, just when the redevelop-

ment project was receiving final approval.

Yonge Street

Yonge Street as a whole is important because its history is closely linked to

that of the city itself. Indeed, “anywhere in Canada, the name ‘Yonge Street’

moore_milroy.indd 45 11/06/2009 11:53:38 AM

46 history

is instantly recognized as a Toronto place name” (Kluckner 1988, 70). It may

be the longest street anywhere. In 1793, when the governor of Upper Canada,

John Graves Simcoe, selected the “Toronto carrying place” as the capital of

the new province of Upper Canada, he laid out a military road to allow for,

in times of war, the quick movement of troops from the original fort and

harbour northward, from Lake Ontario to Lake Simcoe (ibid.). Simcoe named

the road for Sir George Yonge, the British home secretary at the time. From

then onward, the street served as a reference point in several ways. For ex-

ample, it became the literal and figurative dividing line of the city as streets

were laid out and numbered from zero, starting at Yonge. Many Torontonians

think of themselves as coming from either the east or west end, because fam-

ilies traditionally settled in one or the other, and they rarely crossed Yonge

when moving house. Consider the following excerpt from a feature article in

Toronto’s major newspaper on Yonge Street’s “dividing line” effect: “It’s an

age-old bias in the former City of Toronto: you’re a loyal east-ender or west-

ender and never the twain shall meet. The other side is, well, foreign” (White

1999).

early Growth

As the small town (originally called York) grew during the nineteenth century,

the most important cross street (east-west) was King Street, seven blocks south

of where Dundas is today. Dundas did not exist at that time in the area near

Yonge. In 1873 the Yonge and King intersection was identified as the “heart

of the town” by one of Toronto’s first historians, Henry Scadding ([1873] 1966,

276). The city’s most prestigious businesses established themselves on King,

and toward the end of the century the first fashionable shops also opened up

along it. Scadding wondered, however, whether “the needs of the population

and the exigencies of business” would draw the heart northwest, following

the direction it had taken over its 100-year history, to what is now Spadina

and Queen (ibid.).

By the early twentieth century, this “heart” had shifted a short distance straight

northward to the intersection of Yonge and Queen streets. Queen Street, like

Yonge, was laid out by Simcoe as a key military road, and it was considered

the principal east-west axis of the city until the 1960s. It was originally called

Lot Street, because it was lined by “a range of 100-acre lots which were

granted as douceurs to the officials as compensation for having to come to

York” (Arthur 1978, 14). These estates ran north to Bloor Street. At the inter-

section of Yonge and Queen, Toronto’s two major retailers, the Robert Simp-

son Company and the T. Eaton Company, faced each other across Queen

Street. Each catered to a particular clientele: “Eaton’s for the masses, Simpson’s

for the classes,” a local saying went (McQueen 1999, 18). In an era when most

moore_milroy.indd 46 11/06/2009 11:53:38 AM

47history

Torontonians travelled by streetcar, the meeting of the city’s principal cross-

town Queen route and the north-south Yonge route (the spine of the system)

made this crossroads extremely important. The Yonge-Queen intersection had

thus become the undisputed shopping hub of the city; in fact, there was a

special car stop on Queen adjacent to the main entrances of the two depart-

ment stores. South of Queen, Yonge Street was lined with shops and boutiques.

The principal retail product in the area was clothing. Kluckner (1988, 22)

notes that at the turn of the century the garment manufacturing industry em-

ployed more people than any other sector in the city. In fact, the ongoing

importance of this junction was demonstrated by the City of Toronto’s (1963)

Plan for downtown Toronto, which suggested marking Yonge and Queen with

a dramatic structure over the intersection.

One consequence of growth and change was a concerted effort, which

began in the 1890s, to transform Yonge Street into a formal avenue with an

almost European character. Its role as Toronto’s main thoroughfare was to

have been affirmed by an elegant and continuous street wall of “majesty and

controlled uniformity” (Lyon 1978, n.p.). During this period a number of fine

buildings were erected along Yonge Street, such as the Board of Trade build-

ing at the corner of Front and Yonge streets, the Fairweather and Robert

Simpson stores farther north, and the Ryrie Building at Shuter Street (one

block south of the Dundas Square site). Perhaps for economic reasons, or

perhaps because the focus of the city’s property market had already begun

to shift, the street wall was never completed (ibid.). Nonetheless, at the turn

of the century, Yonge Street, between King and Queen streets, was the main

street of Toronto. Period images of this area depict a bustling street, packed

with people going about their daily business.

The 1920s to the 1940s

The intersection at Yonge and Queen was an important node, but Toronto

retailing continued to change and grow. By the 1920s luxury clothing shops

had opened along Bloor Street (Lemon 1985, 41), and more followed. Bloor

Street runs from east to west about eighteen blocks north of and parallel to

Queen Street. City officials acknowledged in Plan for downtown Toronto

(Toronto 1963) that Bloor-Yonge was the focus for high-end retail, although

they still considered Yonge and Queen the main shopping district. The dif-

ferences between the two districts continued. Specialty shopping leapfrogged

northward toward the Yonge-Bloor area throughout the 1960s, eventually

spilling westward into the village of Yorkville, which in the 1960s had become

the focus of Toronto’s hippie counterculture. In the 1970s substantial private-

sector redevelopment occurred, resulting in tony shopping complexes being

introduced, especially Hazelton Lanes and the Holt Renfrew Centre. Both

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48 history

2.1 The Toronto Plant of the T. eaton Co., c. 1919. Foreground, store building; left centre, home furnishings store and its annex; right centre, three mail-order buildings; background, two factory buildings; rear left, old City hall. | illustration courtesy of Archives of ontario; Ditchett (1923, 11).

2.2 looking north on yonge Street, c. 2008. The street has been widened and turned into a boulevard in front of what was eaton’s College Street store, seen on the left. | Courtesy of Sherrill rand

harrison.

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49history

complexes reinforced the current role of the Yonge-Bloor area as the pro-

vider of high-end retail in Toronto.

The most notable event of the period was the effort on the part of Eaton’s

to try to impose its designs on others. It wanted to shift shopping north by

abandoning Queen Street, leapfrogging over Dundas Street, and re-establishing

the shopping district at College Street. From the time it was founded in 1869,

Eaton’s had grown enormously from a small shop on Yonge Street to a major

department store located at Yonge and Queen. It occupied what had become

a disjointed collection of buildings that covered much of the area from Queen

north to Dundas. The Eaton’s buildings that were located in the quadrant

defined by Dundas, Yonge, Queen, and Bay streets are illustrated in Figure

2.1. However, Eaton’s wanted to consolidate its retail in a massive purpose-

built complex (Dendy 1986, 291). To this end, it began to secretly buy up

College Street properties near Yonge Street in the 1910s. The family hoped

to transform College Street into Toronto’s fashionable shopping street (Mc-

Queen 1999, 65). It was a bold move because Yonge Street was not fashion-

able in this stretch. In fact, anywhere north of Queen seems to have been

considered undesirable. And its desired location ignored the fact that Bloor

was already becoming the city’s fashionable street (George Hume 1999;

Lemon 1985, 41). In the 1920s Eaton’s tried to persuade the Robert Simpson

Company, its across-the-street competitor at Queen, to go north too and even

offered it some of Eaton’s landholdings along College Street (McQueen 1999,

65). But Simpson’s wisely declined. The whole concept was ill-devised.

Notwithstanding cautionary signs, in 1928 Eaton’s began constructing a

shopping and entertainment complex that became known as Eaton’s College

Street and is currently known as College Park. The new edifice was art deco

styled, complete with an upscale restaurant and one of the finest auditoriums

in the city. The T. Eaton Company also deeded a strip of its land along the

Yonge Street facade to the City of Toronto so that its new store could be

offset by an appropriately handsome boulevard. This accounts for the un-

expected widening of Yonge Street from Gerrard Street north to College Street,

which is shown in Figure 2.2.

As is noted by Rod McQueen (1999, 67), the move to College Street was

unsuccessful for several reasons. The building, in fact, became known as a

white elephant because of its white limestone cladding. The Great Depression

had set in, shattering consumer confidence, not to mention disposable in-

comes. Eaton’s had to delay indefinitely the construction of the other phases

of the development, including an office tower. The Depression notwith-

standing, Eaton’s failure was also a case of poor decision making. McQueen

(ibid., 68) argued that the Eaton’s College Street store was too upscale for its

customers, who were predominantly working- and middle-class, not the

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50 history

wealthy elite of Toronto. With Simpson’s still located at the shopping hub of

Yonge and Queen, there simply was not enough pedestrian movement up

Yonge Street to the College Street location – which was in the middle of a

very long stretch of Yonge – neither at Queen nor at Bloor. Shoppers were

not lured north in large part because of the very subject of this discussion:

the Yonge-Dundas area. The original plan to close the Queen Street store was

never realized, and for forty years two Eaton stores, just six blocks apart,

operated on Yonge.

Eaton’s, a major employer and an important property tax contributor, was

very successful in the early decades at building and running a vertically inte-

grated corporation that covered manufacturing, retail sales, mail order sales,

and shipping. It was much less successful at understanding how a city func-

tions, which is to say that it had a poor grasp on how its business operations

fit into a larger physical and social context. Ironically, the view of one of the

developers involved in one of Eaton’s many schemes, William Zeckendorf of

Webb & Knapp, was that Eaton’s itself was the “biggest stumbling block in

this city.” He argued that its extensive properties were the source of lower

Yonge Street’s misery because the greater part of the company’s land “lies

idle, either as parking lots or as dusty, truck-choked warehousing. Sprawled

out like a great patch of crabgrass on a lawn, the Eaton holdings effectively

choke any new growth trying to get underway alongside” (cited in McQueen

1999, 164).

First intervention: The yonge Street Subway

Until the middle of the twentieth century, Toronto was a relatively dense,

compact city that had businesses and shops in the centre and residential areas

that spanned outward. Most residents walked or used streetcars. The first

streetcar line in Canada was installed in 1861 on Yonge Street between King

Street and Yorkville’s town hall. Initially horse drawn, the lines were later

electrified. Speeds and service increased, but Yonge, being the central north-

south artery, was often congested. A proposal to build an underground

streetcar line had been put before Torontonians as early as 1910, but it was

defeated in a referendum (Toronto 1987, 10). By the late 1940s, when packed

streetcars were running in two-vehicle trains along Yonge Street at headways

of less than one minute (Lowry 1996, 65), the pressure to build an underground

line surged. However, Yonge Street merchants dreaded trading surface street-

cars, from which passengers could easily see their shops, for underground

rail, with its more widely spaced stops. A popular line was, “A carstop is never

too far from any store” (Ted Wickson, cited in Filey 1986, n.p.).

Despite the merchants’ concerns, construction of the subway line from Front

Street northward to Eglinton Avenue began in 1949 (Toronto 1987, 11). Yonge

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51history

Street thus experienced its first major trauma, because access was severely

limited over the next five years. For months at a time, entire blocks were

closed to vehicular traffic and the streetcars were rerouted on parallel streets

while the trenches that would form the train tunnels were dug and the streets

were rebuilt over them (Greenberg 1991, 196). Although pedestrians always

had access to the shops and restaurants along Yonge, the curtailment of ve-

hicular access in a rapidly motorizing city was the first of several blows to

street-oriented retail.

The first phase of the subway, from Union Station to Eglinton, opened in

March 1954. It was immediately successful as a mode of transportation, carry-

ing 2 million riders in the first week of operation. The subway affirmed Yonge

Street’s role as the spine of the city and served to reinforce the stability of the

downtown core (Lowry 1996, 64-65). In fact, by 1962 property values had

skyrocketed, by as much as four times the city average, along the subway

corridor (Toronto 1987, 33).

At the same time, however, the subway line had a significant effect on

street-oriented retail activities along Yonge. When the subway opened, the

streetcars were removed from Yonge. In 1973 the trolley buses were removed.

It did not take long before the traditional strip retail gave way to concen-

trated development around the subway stations (Greenberg 1991). In fact, as

early as the 1960s, some stretches of lower Yonge Street showed signs of

decline associated with the subway. The merchants’ fears had been well

founded. Herbert Lowe, who owned a shoe store on lower Yonge Street,

commented in response to a 1963 draft version of the Plan for downtown

Toronto: “For small independent retailers, the downtown area has become a

‘decaying heart of the city’ ... It is not a matter of earning a living or making

a profit, but rather a question of who can afford to lose money and hang on

the longest” (cited in City People Community Planning and Research 1974,

20). Lowe believed that this was due to the subway exits that carried people

directly into the Eaton’s or Simpson’s department stores. But other factors

were at work, too. Lowe identified inadequate car parking and the rise of

suburban shopping centres as issues.

The 1960s and the rise of the yonge Street Strip

Yonge Street changed throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The section from Col-

lege to Queen Street began to offer more contemporary leisure and entertain-

ment services rather than live theatre and classical music, which had been

offered until the late 1920s. Entertainment had by and large shifted to movie

theatres; Maple Leaf Gardens, the hockey arena, at College Street (opened in

1931); and taverns, bars, and restaurants, including two especially well-known

restaurants, the Silver Rail and the Brown Derby.

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52 history

When it prepared its 1963 official plan, the City of Toronto acknowledged

the existing entertainment focus of Yonge and wanted to see it, together with

shopping, emphasized and encouraged: “The east side of the street, from

Gerrard to Richmond, has already taken on the distinctive character of an

entertainment strip and this should expand as the population grows ... Any

rebuilding should concentrate on shopping on the west side and entertain-

ment on the east side, especially north of Queen, since these are important

functions of the street” (Toronto 1963, 29-30).

The rate at which replacement activities moved into the area may have

helped mask the fact that Yonge Street was no longer the shopping destina-

tion of choice for Torontonians. For decades shops had been moving away

from the hub of Yonge and Queen. As already mentioned, fashionable bou-

tiques had shifted to Bloor Street West and farther north on the Yonge subway

line at St. Clair Avenue, which was closer to the affluent neighbourhoods of

Rosedale, Moore Park, and Forest Hill. In the 1960s the Canadian department

store chain Hudson’s Bay Company opened a large store at Yonge and Bloor,

at the intersection of the newly opened Bloor subway line and the Yonge

line. This created a secondary core in an interceptor location and strong

competition for consumer traffic on Yonge Street (see Joint Board 1998b,

Exhibit 207A, 5). Shopping centres were opening in the growing suburbs and

offering a wide range of goods and services in climate-controlled environ-

ments, which was a significant consideration in a region with cold, windy

winters and hot, humid summers. As well, stores in this section of Yonge had

gathered in the underground pathways that linked subway stations and major

buildings.

But other activities were moving elsewhere, too. The Yonge Street area may

once have served as a crucible of sorts for Toronto’s budding music and arts

scene, but by the 1970s this scene was relocating southwest to Queen and

King streets. For example, the restoration of the Royal Alexandra Theatre in

1963 and the opening of several restaurants along King Street West in the

1970s were followed by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra moving to Roy

Thomson Hall in the King West area in 1982. The symphony’s departure from

its long-time home at Massey Hall left the 1894 concert hall at Shuter and

Victoria without a resident ensemble. And then, too, Yonge-Dundas was left

without one of its anchoring entertainment functions.

It was not long before retail businesses along Yonge Street came to be

dominated by record stores, novelty shops, and discount outlets, and by the

early 1970s the sex trade was well established. The blocks between Dundas

Square and Gerrard Street were host to a particularly raunchy range of taverns,

exotic dance halls, body-rub parlours, and bookstores that allegedly sold

pornography and the like, and they soon came to be known as the “Yonge

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53history

Street Strip,” the area shown in Figure 2.3. Myers (1977, 122) notes that there

were about thirty body-rub parlours in the area in 1973 and about one hun-

dred in 1975. Despite a clampdown on the sex trade, including the licensing

of massage parlours, Yonge Street had clearly found a new niche in the retail

market as the city’s one and only strip. In fact, the redevelopment scheme

tried to hold onto part of the strip’s reputation – its flashing lights, noise, ac-

tion, and intensity – but tried to attach it to uncontroversial retail aimed at

higher-income users and families. The plan was to attract retailers who would

not sell sex per se but who would doubtless use sexualized images to stimu-

late sales.

2.3 The built form of the yonge Street Strip, as it was in 1975. | Adapted from Toronto (1975, 50).

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54 history

Second intervention: The yonge Street Mall

In response to the shifts of activity that gave lower Yonge Street a somewhat

tawdry image, beginning in the early 1970s a series of concerted efforts were

made to reverse the decline. The central problem was defined as getting more

shoppers into the area. An early effort focused on making the public space

in the area more agreeable. A pedestrian mall was proposed. Pedestrian malls

were popular in North American cities at the time. To test its feasibility in

Toronto, Yonge Street was closed to traffic for six days in early June 1971.

Benches, planters, fountains, and outdoor cafés were set up along the side-

walks and in the roadway. There were handicraft vendors, and the City of

Toronto organized daily entertainments at noon and in the early evening.

Torontonians seemed to find it “a smashing success that first year” (Myers 1977,

126). The following summer, the project was increased in size and duration.

But the 1973 scheme was the most elaborate of all. Lasting for eleven weeks,

it extended over two kilometres of Yonge Street, from Gerrard Street to King

Street, with fountains, garden installations, information kiosks, and plenty of

2.4 A section of yonge Street temporarily converted into a pedestrian mall, c. 1974. | Courtesy of

Archives of ontario, rG 65-35-2-68.

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55history

street furniture (ibid.; Kilbourn 1984, 22). Figure 2.4 shows the mall in oper-

ation. But the following year, the mall was closed down early, after being

only six weeks in operation. Several reasons were given: the disruption in

traffic was not justifiable, the mall became a gathering place for “degenerates,”

the experiment failed to increase sales for merchants, and there was an in-

crease in nuisance crimes associated with crowd control (Myers 1977, 126-27).

The reasons for closing it down were questioned by a local journalist who

grew up on Yonge Street and who at the time was a newly graduated city

planner. He and several planning school colleagues formed a cooperative that

was hired in 1974 to study the mall. He said they surveyed every single mer-

chant on the street where the pedestrian mall operated and “found that a

majority of the merchants supported the mall. But the big department stores

were against it. They didn’t want people outside listening to speakers and

street musicians. They wanted them inside shopping” (Stein 1996).

Another study of the mall was commissioned by Toronto City Council,

which asked whether the mall should be made permanent. The study recom-

mended that Yonge Street be closed to vehicular circulation from Queen Street

south to Wellington Street and that the sidewalks from Dundas Street to Col-

lege Street be widened. It is interesting to note that, according to this study,

the portion of Yonge most suitable for a full-fledged mall was south of Queen

Street, which suggests that the greatest concentration of activity was in that

area and not near Dundas Street. Pedestrian counts taken in 1969-70 lend

weight to this hypothesis. For example, over the course of the eight-hour day

during which observations were made, the total number of pedestrians at

the Yonge-Queen intersection was about 43,000, while the total number of

pedestrians at Yonge-Dundas was about 30,900, or about 25 percent less. In

addition, although the number of pedestrians at Yonge-Dundas was rela-

tively steady throughout the day, foot traffic at Yonge-Queen more than

doubled in the afternoon, suggesting that this area was a popular destination

for leisure activities in the afternoon and evening. By contrast, the number of

cars passing through the Yonge-Dundas intersection was considerably great-

er (Harrold et al. 1971).

That was not the end of the studies. A subsequent consultants’ report rec-

ommended the opposite, that Yonge Street be kept open in its usual fashion

because “the absence of vehicles and surface transit systems created a some-

what artificial atmosphere – an atmosphere which was sometimes exploited

by hawkers and propagandists” (Globe and Mail 1974).

Ultimately, the pedestrian mall was rejected. It seemed to cause more prob-

lems than it solved. In Kenneth Greenberg’s view, it “amplified the problems

of prostitution, panhandling, and drugs, and created an atmosphere that was

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56 history

perceived to be unpleasant and out of control” (1991, 196). As constructed,

the mall did not address the underlying socioeconomic or investment prob-

lems that, by that time, were clearly manifesting themselves along the street.

Third intervention: The Construction of the eaton Centre

The Yonge and Queen intersection was still the focal point of downtown

shopping in 1963, when the City of Toronto was preparing its self-study

prior to writing its official plan. However, there were early signs that the

clientele of core-area retailers was changing. Their traditional clientele base

had been shoppers from all over the city. Shoppers were now increasingly

downtown workers. The general population was making more and more of

its purchases outside of the core (Toronto 1963, 29). In response, the city

looked to Eaton’s to lead the way in reinforcing the vitality of the downtown

shopping district. The official plan noted that “perhaps the best opportunity

lies in any redevelopment of the extensive T. Eaton Co. Ltd. properties be-

tween Yonge and Bay, north of Queen. As a well-designed project this could

have the great merit of building onto what is already the great downtown

shopping centre” (ibid.).

By the late 1960s, Eaton’s had acquired most of the land that extended from

Yonge Street west to Bay Street and from Queen Street north to Dundas Street.

Its retail operations were still spread throughout a disjointed collection of

buildings that made up the flagship store at Yonge and Queen and the store

at College Street, while manufacturing, catalogue sales, and warehousing were

located in the area south of Dundas Street between Yonge and Bay. It was

time to consolidate. Eaton’s wanted to demolish the whole Queen-Dundas-

Yonge-Bay area and build a new complex that would include office towers,

a new flagship store, and an indoor shopping concourse. Discussions about

a series of plans went on for more than fifteen years. Designs by I.M. Pei were

supplanted by those of E.L. Hankinson; James A. Murray and Victor Gruen;

and Haldenby and Mathers, in conjunction with Skidmore, Owings and Mer-

rill, LLP, respectively (McQueen 1999, 163). By this time it was becoming clear

that redevelopment plans included tearing down the Old City Hall, a classic

late nineteenth-century sandstone building with a clock tower that stood at

Queen and Bay, as well as the Church of the Holy Trinity near Dundas, which

dated from 1847. In addition to the church’s historical and architectural merits,

it had social significance. It was the first Anglican church in Toronto in which

“the working class residents of what was then the outskirts of Toronto could

worship for free” (ibid., 164). In other churches, pews were rented.

Arguments over the sweeping plans to destroy these two landmarks continued

in 1967, when a plan was rejected thanks to the work of an organization

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57history

called Friends of Old City Hall, and in 1972, when another scheme bit the

dust, rejected by Toronto City Council. That scheme was typical for the era:

it called for a fortress-like megastructure that turned its back on the surround-

ing streets. The proposal was a dramatic change from the existing store, which

was known for its elaborate window displays that drew enormous crowds at

Christmas (Toronto 1990a). Under the new scheme, there would be no more

traditional window displays because there would be no windows: “The basic

principle behind the planning of the Centre was that all shoppers, and even

casual pedestrians, would be drawn inside, leaving the city’s streets and

sidewalk-oriented businesses behind” (Dendy 1986, 291).

The plan also called for the demolition of the Church of the Holy Trinity

and the Old City Hall. This sparked another uproar. Torontonians, having

already lost many historic buildings, had become sensitized to their dwindling

built heritage, and the proposal for an Eaton Centre was rejected by Toronto

City Council in 1972. New discussions led Eaton’s to hire the Toronto architect

Eberhard Zeidler to develop a proposal that would better integrate the struc-

ture within the surrounding urban fabric. His design consisted of a huge

galleria, which was modelled loosely on the Galleria Victor Emmanuel in

Milan (which dated from 1867); office towers; and a new nine-storey flagship

store for Eaton’s, which was to be built with its main entrance at Yonge and

Dundas (Toronto 1990a, 24; McQueen 1999). The galleria linked the new

Eaton’s with Simpson’s department store, still at Queen Street. The two de-

partment stores were to be the anchors for smaller shops and restaurants

located on several levels in the galleria. This scheme was thought to be much

better: like Milan’s Galleria, Zeidler’s initial scheme called for a mixture of

uses, including housing, a library, and genuine indoor public space (Dendy

1986, 291). But the developers were not keen on a mixed-use development,

and the concept was dropped. Like earlier plans, Zeidler’s also turned inward

from Yonge Street.2

Construction of the Eaton Centre started in 1973 and took five years to

complete. Once again, access to Yonge Street was made difficult in that area,

just as it had been when the subway was being built (Lemon 1985, 160).

However, although street-level merchants did suffer during the construction

period, the popularity of the Eaton Centre, once completed, brought new life

to a part of the city that had been stagnating, if not declining. When it opened

in 1977, it was an instant success: the number of people entering the mall

averaged 500,000 a week and increased to 750,000 a week during the Christ-

mas season, and Eaton’s total sales increased by 38 percent in the first eight

months of operation (McQueen 1999, 207).3 The number of people entering

the Eaton Centre annually now runs to the tens of millions. Figure 2.5 shows

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58 history

2.5 Toronto eaton Centre interior, looking north, 2008. The photograph shows activity on several levels, the glass arcade effect, and the Canada geese sculptures. | Courtesy of Sherrill rand harrison.

moore_milroy.indd 58 11/06/2009 11:53:40 AM

59history

the Eaton Centre’s interior. According to one commentator, the redevelopment

process gave Torontonians new confidence that city government could have

a positive and formative role in guiding development (Dendy 1986, 293).

Fourth intervention: Downzoning and the 1978 yonge Street

revitalization Project

The Eaton Centre was an anomaly on the Yonge Street Strip: it could com-

mand much higher rents from retailers than other properties, and it attracted

higher-income shoppers. A 1975 plan for the Central Area reduced the floor

space index from 12 to 2 for the east side of the street (Toronto 1975).4 This

is how an economic researcher described that action: “The restrictive planning

policies developed [after the Eaton Centre was underway] assured that the

hugely successful experience could not be repeated on the east side of Yonge

Street as the market would otherwise have encouraged” (Joint Board 1998b,

Exhibit 207A, 17). The siting of the Eaton Centre right at the Yonge Street

sidewalk, and its almost entirely closed facade, brought two-sided retail to a

dead stop along the full length of Yonge Street, from Dundas to Queen.

Amid these circumstances, a consulting firm was hired in 1978 to develop

a strategy to make the street healthy and vibrant (Lyon 1978). It recommended

creating a European-style pedestrian shopping street.5 The long-term vision

for the Central Area included a pedestrianized downtown area (defined by

Yonge, Bay, King, and Queen streets), a ring road system (consisting of Uni-

versity Avenue, College/Carlton streets, Jarvis Street, and Front Street), and

extensive parking facilities at the periphery of the pedestrian precinct. Because

traffic impact studies had not been done to establish the wisdom of making

such dramatic changes, an interim plan proposed widening the sidewalks by

reducing the number of vehicle lanes from four to two to discourage through

traffic. A high-quality pedestrian realm would be created, with appropriate

surface treatments; weather protection in the form of arcades, awnings, and

glass canopies; plantings; seating; outdoor patios for restaurants and cafés;

public toilets at street level; and enhanced entrances to the subway stations

(Greenberg 1991, 196).

The 1978 revitalization proposal was nonetheless rejected. Yonge Street

was not controlled by the city but by the Metropolitan Toronto government,

which designated Yonge Street an important regional traffic artery. It refused

to allow the number of lanes on lower Yonge Street to be reduced, in spite

of the fact that it carried many more people on foot than by car.6 Some at-

tributed this refusal to the fact that the Metropolitan Toronto Council had

more suburban than urban councillors – the former could not grasp the ur-

banity issue that was being presented to them.

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60 history

Derailed but not defeated, the City of Toronto shifted its attention to en-

hancing the streets that intersected with Yonge and over which it had control.

Changes by the city included widening the Gould Street sidewalk on the north

side and installing permanent, canopied vendors’ spaces and several chess

tables and seats. These changes were very successful at the time.

In 1982 another move by city council was to designate the Theatre Block

(bounded by Queen, Yonge, Shuter, and Victoria streets) as a redevelopment

area. The block contains several listed or designated heritage structures, in-

cluding the Elgin and Winter Garden theatres located at 189 Yonge Street, the

concert facilities of Massey Hall at 15 Shuter Street, three historical bank build-

ings (at 173, 197, and 205 Yonge Street), and the former Heintzman building

at 193 Yonge Street.7 Between two of the banks was the Colonial Tavern,

which was listed by the Toronto Historical Board solely to protect the facades

of the banks it abutted. This is not to say that the Colonial Tavern had not had

its own moments of significance. Members of Jazz Watch and the Jazz Action

Society came to council to attest that “international musicians such as Duke

Ellington, Count Basie, Oscar Peterson, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah

Vaughan, and Buck Clayton found Toronto and the Colonial one of their fa-

vourite places to perform” (Joint Board 1998b, Exhibit 96). However, the

Colonial Tavern had fallen on hard times and, by then, belonged to the city.

A revitalization concept for part of the block began to take shape when the

provincial and federal governments announced they would contribute to

restoring the Elgin and Winter Garden theatres, which were then owned by

the province’s Ministry of Citizenship and Culture and the Ontario Heritage

Foundation. The councillor who headed the task force on the Theatre Block

likened the initiative to “a cross between a miniature Lincoln Centre and Times

Square, if all its theatres were to be cleaned up” (cited in Godfrey 1983). The

idea was to demolish the Colonial Tavern, which was dilapidated, and create

a landscaped passage between the two rather beautiful old banks from Yonge

through to Victoria Street. The Colonial Tavern’s golden age of jazz would be

recalled through the design of the passage and by naming it “Jazz Place.”

Meanwhile, the Pantages Theatre on Victoria Street was undergoing chan-

ges. The theatre has a fascinating history. With 3,373 seats, it was the largest

and most elegant Canadian theatre that served both vaudeville and motion

picture audiences (Mirvish Productions; for a different, colourful account, see

Drabinsky 1995, chap. 14). It was designed by Thomas Lamb, built in 1920

by the Canadian motion picture distributor Nathan L. Nathanson, owned by

Pericles Alexander Pantages until he was jailed in 1929, sold to RKO Pictures,

which became Famous Players, and renamed the Imperial in 1930. The theatre

was later divided into a six-plex cinema in 1973; half of it was seized by

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61history

Cineplex Odeon in 1986 through an administrative oversight by Famous Play-

ers. It was soon transferred to Garth Drabinsky’s Livent, rebuilt for live theatre

again under the name the Pantages, and reopened in 1989, only to be lost in

bankruptcy proceedings to SFX/Clear Channel Entertainment. The theatre,

having been renamed the Canon Theatre in 2001 in recognition of financial

support from Canon Canada, is currently managed and programmed by Mir-

vish Productions. It is oddly configured in that it has a fancy, if small, entrance

on Yonge Street, while the bulk of the building is on Victoria Street, where

the box office is located.

The Elgin and Winter Garden theatres were built together as a unit in 1913.

Like the Pantages, they were designed by Thomas Lamb and have spotty

histories. The Winter Garden, fitted out like a botanical fantasy, was closed

in 1928, while the Elgin continued as a movie theatre. The Ontario Heritage

Foundation bought both buildings in 1981, renovated them at a cost of $30

million, and reopened them – the Elgin in 1985 and the Winter Garden in

1989 – as live performance theatres (see also Ontario Heritage Foundation).

The city was thus moving along with initiatives when it could see an open-

ing. But private investment in the street’s properties was not forthcoming,

which meant public investments had modest effect. Within a couple of years,

the city was gripped in a serious economic recession, as were other levels of

government and the private sector. This would all but halt investments for

about five years.

Fifth intervention: Cityplan ’91 and the retailing Problem

The fifth intervention played out in 1994. Eaton’s threatened to challenge the

city’s newly created official plan at the Ontario Municipal Board because, in

the company’s view, the plan did not adequately champion retailing in the

core. The negotiations between the city and the company that ensued were

directly connected to plans for redeveloping the Yonge-Dundas area, which

is the subject of this book, so discussion of this intervention is postponed

until the next chapter.

In concluding this look at the evolution of lower Yonge Street, it is obvious

that its character, including the location and nature of shopping and entertain-

ment over the stretch between King and College/Carlton streets, has been

anything but constant. For a period in the first half of the twentieth century,

portions of the street served as the city’s shopping district of choice, but this

changed after the Second World War. Major public-sector interventions have

had mixed effects. To successfully change the pattern of use on Yonge Street

is undoubtedly complicated. The city has been careful over the decades not

to leap too quickly.

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62 history

Before investigating the most recent proposals and actions, which are dis-

cussed in the next chapter, we turn our attention to the history of the Yonge-

Dundas intersection. In arguments about fixing the area, the intersection was

referred to as the “Main and Main” of the city and also as its heart (Joint Board

1998k, 3).

Yonge and Dundas

Although Yonge Street as a whole is clearly of great importance to Toronto,

the idea that Yonge-Dundas has traditionally been a major urban hub is er-

roneous. Dundas has been relatively insignificant as an east-west axis. In the

nineteenth century there was a Dundas Street that began far to the west of the

city centre at what is now the intersection of Ossington Avenue and Queen

Street. It meandered westward toward the town of Dundas, near the city of

Hamilton (Careless 1984, 25; Armstrong 1988, 44), just as Kingston Road in the

eastern suburbs led to the city of Kingston. The current incarnation of Dundas

Street is the result of a civic improvement project of the early part of the twen-

tieth century, the goal of which was to create a new east-west traffic link to

improve the efficiency of the city’s circulation networks (Careless 1984, 193).

Starting in 1916, a series of east-west streets that ran a suitable distance north

of Queen were joined together and renamed Dundas Street (Filey 1986).8 The

new crosstown route linked the west end road known originally as Dundas

with neighbourhoods to the east, beyond the Don Valley.9 This improvised

street wanders across Toronto’s orthogonal grid with a great many jogs and

several unusual intersections.

At what is now Yonge and Dundas, creating the intersection involved forcing

Wilton Street (on the east of Yonge) and Agnes Street (on the west of Yonge)

to meet. At Yonge Street, these two streets were out of alignment by about

seventy metres. Figure 2.6 shows the proposed route of the alignment. Sev-

eral properties on Yonge Street and Victoria Street (to the east) had to be

demolished so that the continuation of Dundas was straight enough to support

a streetcar line.10 This left a parcel of land that was called Old Wilton Square

and later renamed Dundas Square (Joint Board 1998b, Exhibit 162, 7).

Throughout the nineteenth century, the streets around Dundas and Yonge

were local in nature and largely residential in use. The housing was built and

poorly serviced, and it was overcrowded. To the west of what is now Yonge

and Dundas was one of Toronto’s lowest-income neighbourhoods, a settle-

ment area for successive waves of impoverished immigrants – Irish, eastern

Europeans, Italians, and Chinese (Careless 1984, 157; Kluckner 1988, 135-42).

The streets also housed Eaton’s back offices, which supported the company’s

sprawling store to the south and its national retail activities. The company’s

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63history

central mail-order warehouse was located there, as was a multistorey manu-

facturing complex in which much of the clothing Eaton’s distributed to its

stores across Canada was made (Dendy 1986, 291; Lemon 1985, 39). Residents

of the area provided cheap labour for these clothing manufacturers: “Sharing

the blocks with the little houses and shops were factories of every size and

description ... there was scarcely a block that did not have some sort of tailor-

ing enterprise, ranging from well-organized factories in lofts to the meanest,

most pitiful sweatshops in grubby lean-tos in the back alleyways” (Kluckner

1988, 135).

The 1934 Bruce Report on housing conditions in Toronto showed that

dwellings with below-standard amenities began to be concentrated west of

2.6 Plan to connect Dundas Street West and east. | Daily Star 1921.

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64 history

Yonge, from about Dundas to near College, and increased in density as one

moved farther west to Spadina and Bathurst (Toronto 1934, 16-17).

Still on the west side of Yonge, the city’s poorhouse (known as the House

of Industry) occupied almost an entire block on Elm Street, just a stone’s throw

from the Dundas Square site. Slightly west of that, on Centre Avenue, was the

city’s equivalent of a red-light district (Kluckner 1988, 135). Consequently, in

the Toronto of old, steeped as it was in Victorian notions of morality, this area

was often perceived as being marked by immorality and crime.

The character of the land use was no more polished on the east side of

Yonge than on the west. There was likewise a mix of residential, commercial,

and retail property or land, but there was only one major industrial use –

brewing. According to an environmental assessment of the area prepared for

the city by consultants, “the only industrial development in the area was the

O’Keefe Brewing Co. Ltd. which was located on the east and west side of

Victoria Street, between Gould Street and Dundas Street East. The O’Keefe

Brewing Co. Ltd. discontinued operations at the site in the mid-1960s. The

buildings were vacated and remained unused until demolition. The property

was subsequently purchased by Ryerson Polytechnical Institute” (Joint Board

1998b, Exhibit 162, 6). Just to the northeast of the brewery was St. James

Square, one of Toronto’s few planned open spaces (Dendy 1993, 150). It was

surrounded by three elegant buildings that housed the Normal School, the

Model School, and the Department of Education. These buildings later became

the home of what is now Ryerson University. When Ryerson was founded on

the site in 1949, it was sitting in the midst of what Ron Stagg (1998) has de-

scribed as “one of the less desirable areas of Toronto.”

From 1899 the Society for Working Boys operated a home for disadvantaged

youth on Gould Street, a block north of Dundas. In 1958 that building became

the Ryerson Student Union building. Just a couple of blocks away, on the east

side of Yonge between Gould and Gerrard (at no. 381), was the Yonge Street

Mission. It has continuously operated at that location since 1904, serving vari-

ous publics, most recently youth. It was named Evergreen in 1979 (Mathers

and Mohamed 2004, 1-2).

The uses that have occupied the four corners of Yonge and Dundas over

the years have not convinced us that the area has been the heart of the city,

the main and main. The city’s 1959 interim plan predicted that the area would

consist of higher-density housing, with local shopping along Yonge Street

north of Dundas (Toronto 1959). In the 1960s the City of Toronto (Toronto

1963, 40) noted that, aside from limited warehousing and manufacturing uses,

and some wholesale or retail activity along Victoria Street, the area was pri-

marily residential. The city’s own interpretation of the area on the east side

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65history

of Yonge at Dundas was as follows: “In all, this part of downtown is occupied

by a number of distinct elements and several very mixed pockets. It is not a

cohesive unit, but rather a backwater between more important, recognizable

areas ... The area has no special advantage for office or retail business which

would change its character” (ibid., 40-41).

A few years later, in 1971, the director of the City of Toronto Planning

Board, on the subject of Dundas’ role as an east-west axis, said that “any

concept of Dundas Street as a cross-City connector seems questionable” (To-

ronto 1971, 2).

Although Dundas Street does have a role as a local shopping street in certain

sections (e.g., in Kensington Market, west of Spadina), for the most part it is

not distinctive. In fact, to the east of the Don Valley, Dundas is primarily a

residential street. Clearly, Dundas, unlike Queen to the south or Bloor to the

north, never did develop as an important east-west axis of any sort.

Taking the background of Yonge and Dundas into account, it is odd that

this intersection should be described as the “main and main” of Toronto. If it

is the heart, it has come by this distinction because of the Eaton Centre en-

trance, not because the intersection was especially distinctive otherwise. As

we will see, that distinctive entrance was removed in the course of redevelop-

ment because it was a magnet for people who liked to hang around, to

proselytize, and to ply the informal economy.

Conclusion

The Yonge-Dundas area has been constantly busy over the years with retail

or commercial and residential uses, as well as brewing, warehousing, and

garment manufacturing. Whatever stylishness one could attribute to the area

tended to be found closer to Queen than to Dundas. More raunchy activities

had asserted their presence on Yonge north of Shuter and mainly north of

Dundas by around the early 1970s.

The claim made by proponents of this project that Yonge-Dundas was once

the flourishing and vibrant heart of the downtown is not corroborated by

historical evidence. Nor is there substance to the claim that it was a fashion-

able part of the city that had fallen on hard times. In 1963 the City of To-

ronto described Yonge-Dundas as the “backwater between more important,

recognizable areas.” It has been given a nostalgic past that is more correctly

attributed to other nodes on Yonge.

These facts did not stop the fall-and-redemption and rotting heart imagery

from being used with considerable effect in efforts to generate support for

redevelopment plans. The use of this type of blatant imagery is common in

the business of selling cities and development. It is unlikely to work on its

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66 history

own, but as part of building up meaning through images, and as a form of

rhetoric used in the course of trying to persuade, it is often part of a purpose-

ful strategy for gaining attention. Indeed, speakers often use metaphors

without being aware of doing so or of how inaccurate the imagery is, which

is probably the case here.

On the one hand, we have no choice but to use metaphors. On the other,

we should not be taken in by our own metaphors. Use of metaphor is built

deep into Western ways of thinking, speaking, and writing. Consequently, we

should be urged to ask in any given instance, what metaphor is at work? It

should be opened up to critical analysis.

If the use of imagery in urban redevelopment is common, why do we need

yet another story to illustrate it? The answer is because we still have not in-

corporated imagery and its effects into a theory of how planning works.

Imagery is still treated as if it were an aberration rather than part of how

planning functions. Certainly, metaphors should not stand unquestioned as

the basis for a redevelopment project.11 This is a central message of this book.

This chapter has also illustrated how the core of the city altered, over a

century or so, in concert with changes occurring to its surrounding urban

region. What was left was a small space that no longer provided the essential

goods and services of daily life to the growing population on its ever expanding

periphery.

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